Even the best companies make products that fail. Such is the case with Facebook’s email system – a feature that was highly touted a few years ago but was rarely used by anyone.
Last week, Facebook acquired messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion, and this week, Facebook quietly killed off its email program.
Facebook launched that email system four years ago. It gave users an @facebook.com email address which they could use alongside their Facebook messaging inbox. The idea was to get users to send their external emails through Facebook servers and turn Facebook into the most important site on the internet.
Over the past few years, very few people have ever used their @facebook.com email address. A company spokesperson recently stated that:
“Most people have not been using their @facebook.com email address.”
For the few users who were using the @facebook.com email address, Facebook will now forward all emails to that primary address, which means they won’t miss any messages. Furthermore, any ongoing conversations that include an email address will no longer be modifiable and will become “read only”.
What’s next for the world’s largest social network? Facebook wants to use WhatsApp to connect to “billions” of users. It hasn’t revealed any plans about how it plans to do that, although it’s likely we’ll see WhatsApp combined with Facebook profiles and Facebook Messenger in some way or another.