Why I like Facebook email.

So my last post was also about Facebook's email features and it wasn't particularly positive. That had a lot more to do with the way they had been thrust on us rather than the fundamental features though. Facebook email is actually kind of neat. It has the potential to be the start of integration of the two things I check the most online. Ever since Facebook rolled out the @facebook.com email addresses for every Facebook user the potential has been there to have emails sent directly to your Facebook messages or to send messages to any email address from Facebook. Here is an example below where I was testing the service sending a message from my Facebook account to a gmail address.

Sending the message from my Facebook account.

What the message looked at in my gmail inbox.

While not everyone has or uses Facebook regularly the ability to manage your emails and social networking in one place could become very useful. The service handles attachments well and can easily be used for quick messages while on Facebook. However, until it can integrate with current email addresses I can't see it being particularly popular. It is fairly basic at this point and there are not a lot of options for organising messages easily. Particularly for personal emails though I would say there is some serious potential here. Like us on Facebook or follow us on twitter to hear more tips and tricks in the future!

Facebook changes email addresses.

Yesterday I noticed a small change to my Facebook profile page. Where I once had my personal email address displayed in my contact info under the 'about' button I now had an @facebook.com address. I see this an attempt on the part of Facebook to have a larger presence in another area of our internet lives. This desire to take a larger chunk of the pie is not necessarily either a good or bad thing but I am not a fan of how they have gone about making this change with no warning or notification. I had specific reasons for having my personal email address available in my contact details for my friends to see and you might have as well.

Luckily changing it back is fairly simple and can be done in a few easy steps:

• Navigate to your profile page and click on the "About" button just below your profile picture in Timeline.
• Scroll down to the "Contact Info" section and hit "Edit". You should get a drop down like the one below.

•  On the far right of the image click on the drop down menu next to the circles. You want to switch the setting for your personal and your @facebook.com email addresses so that your personal one has "display on timeline" selected and the @facebook.com address has "hidden from timeline" selected.

This should change things back so that once again an email address that you actually use is displayed. Check us out on Facebook for more posts like this or follow us on Twitter for helpful and interesting titbits. Coming up... Why I like Facebook email addresses.