Facebook today announced a change for how people can find you on its network — a move for more consistency, but also another route to getting people to use more email in Facebook, and secure its place as the center of your web life. Facebook is now rolling out a service where the name you use in your Facebook Timeline will be the same as the name on your Facebook email account.
The update, Facebook wrote in its announcement, will be rolling out over the next few weeks. “Anyone who already selected an email address will not be affected,” Facebook noted.
It’s not clear how many of us have already linked up a Facebook email address with our Timeline page — I’ve asked Facebook if it could provide that stat to me — but this move will mean that now all of us will (whether we wanted to or not). You can check your status here.
It means that it will become a lot easier for people to use your Facebook email to contact you, and seems to go directly in the face of other web mail services, specifically Google’s Gmail. What Facebook is making a lot easier is the link up between these two. Finding a person’s Timeline on Facebook, if you know that email address, will now be super easy, and vice versa.
“Facebook+” quipped one observer on Twitter.
It’s notable that Google has yet to make its own email and social networking product, Google+, as linked-up and user-friendly. TechCrunch’s Google+ site is https://plus.google.com/103037366582313115962/ On Facebook it’s http://www.facebook.com/techcrunch
Which do you think is more catchy?
