Facebook admits email switch could have been handled better
After angering many of its users by switching the listed emails on their profile, Facebook has acknowledged that it did not handle the recent change the best way it could have, according to a report.
A spokeswoman for the social network giant said Facebook likely could have done a better job explaining to users that there would be an email switchover.
Facebook said it had previously announced that a switch was coming back in April, but the announcement did not detail the fact that the social network would be hiding users’ email addresses and instead listing their “@facebook.com” addresses.
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But while the company has now admitted fault in the handling of the process, Facebook says the purpose of the switch was not to get more people to use their email service, which until the recent switch most people had no idea even existed despite it launching in late 2010.
“We want people to use whatever service is most effective for them,” the spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal.
Facebook says it made the switch to add consistency to the site. Since its April announcement, the company has been giving users’ personal URLs that are supposed to match up with their email addresses, but while that may be the case, even consistency didn’t explain why it hid email addresses from other services.
Many users were upset about the switch, but more were upset about how Facebook went about it. Others didn’t even want the email address and asked if there was any way to delete it.
If you want to change your listed email address, go to your profile, click “Update info,” scroll down to “Contact Info” and click “Edit.” Select with whom you want to share each individual email address and to the right of that choose whether you want your email displayed on your timeline or not by using little gray circles.
If the circles don’t function for you, as they didn’t for at least one user, be patient and try the next day. Facebook normally rolls out changes to its 900 million users over time, not all at once.
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