• TechCunch, Friday, April 13, 2012 1:48 PM

Largely seen as an effort to promote its email service, Facebook is debuting a service where the name a member uses in their Facebook Timeline will be the same as the one on their Facebook email account. It’s “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,” TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden surmises. That said, “Anyone who already selected an email address will not be affected,” the social network assured in an official announcement, this week. Meanwhile, “It’s not clear how many of us have already linked up a Facebook email address with our Timeline page,” Lunden notes.

“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.” What’s clear is that the move will make it a lot easier for members to use their Facebook email to contact other members. This, as Lunden adds, “seems to go directly in the face of other web mail services, specifically Google’s Gmail.” While Google continues to struggle in social media, its Gmail service has so far proven far more successful than Facebook’s email strategy.

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