Check your Facebook mail lately?
Didn't think so. Apparently not many others did,
either. So after three-plus years, the world's largest social media outlet is
pulling the plug on its little-used e-mail service, the company confirmed
Tuesday.
"We're making this change because most people
haven't been using their Facebook e-mail address, and we can focus on improving
our mobile messaging experience for everyone," Facebook said in a
statement.
For those who do have a Facebook mail account,
messages will be forwarded to the primary e-mail address listed in a user's
account, the company said. The changes are planned to roll out in March, and
users can turn off that forwarding option if they prefer not to have their
personal inboxes flooded with these messages.
"It's a little bit of bowing to the
inevitable," said Justin Lafferty, editor of the trade site Inside
Facebook. The e-mail addresses, which showed up as messages for Facebook users,
never took off, and when Facebook tried to make them the default e-mail
accounts for all users in mid-2012, "a lot of people were unhappy with
that," he said.
"It was kind of rolled out to everyone
regardless of what they wanted," Lafferty said.
With last
week's $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp, the fast-growing messaging
service, Facebook is focusing more on mobile messaging than e-mail these days.
Facebook ventured into the e-mail field in November
2010, adding the service to the messaging system already used heavily by its
1.2 billion users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the system would
complement, not compete, with entrenched e-mail giants such as Google, Yahoo
and Microsoft.
"We don't expect anyone to wake up tomorrow and
say, 'I'm going to shut down my Yahoo account or my Gmail account and switch
exclusively to Facebook.' But we do expect a shift to more real-time
communication," he said.
Lafferty said the reversal is unlikely to be
remembered in the company's annals -- much like the service itself.
"Many people probably weren't even aware of the
change," he said.
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