Facebook’s latest changes - email address and URL
Posted: Tuesday 26 June, 2012
Keredy Andrews
Unless you’re extremely eagle eyed or you follow the tech media, I’m guessing you won’t know that Facebook has changed the email address that appears on your profile page/Timeline. If your email was already set to ‘hidden’ it should remain so but you’ll still find this new Facebook address listed. Don’t go to your account settings to make a change, as I did when I heard about it, from your Timeline click ‘about’, which is located under your square photo on the left of the page. Scroll to your contact info and here you’ll most likely find that your email is a facebook.com one.
If you want to remove this Facebook email from public view, click on ‘edit’ and you can choose ‘hidden from timeline’ in the dropdown menu next to the address (see image). Or you can just choose who sees it – it is likely to be set to ‘friends’.
Emails sent to this address will arrive in your Facebook messages (private messages) unless you happen to be one of the people who receive them in your Other Messages folder, which it is believed to be due to an error. I would recommend that while you’re next in Facebook, have a look at what you have in this folder – you may be surprised with how many messages you have there! From your home page, click on ‘messages’ at the top left and then you then should find that ‘other’ appears just below.
So why has Facebook made this change? Since April, Facebook has been rolling out updates to its email function so that all @facebook.com emails are consistent and, more importantly, that everyone has one. The email address was a service option that launched a few years ago but it didn’t really catch on; now it seems that Facebook is reminding all its users of the function. It could be a very useful way of those without Facebook profiles to contact friends who love to use the platform….. but then again, they’ll probably just use your the Hotmail or Gmail email address that you’ve used for years, not one that’s just been quietly created. New, young Facebookers could be the real target market but there is no age restriction on having an email account, most 13 years olds already have an address.
If you have a vanity URL, Facebook has replicated this as your email but because I have never claimed one Facebook has now created one for me - a first and surname combination - that is also the same as my new Facebook email. Nevertheless, as I haven’t personally chosen it, it appears that I do have the option to change this, my ‘username’, in the general account settings. Your username can only be changed once so once you have made a selection, you’re stuck with it. I do have a very unique name so the John Smith’s of the world may find that they’ve been given a suffix of numbers, after their name, such as john.smith7539.
As with most Facebook changes, my advice is to be aware of it and decide what settings are right for you. Plus, don’t forget to snoop around your own profile and settings every couple of months because subtle amendments and additions happen all the time.
