Facebook is making Instagram and WhatsApp workers adopt Facebook-themed email addresses because the social network tries to integrate its family of apps ever-more closely together.
In an interview
with Business insider at
the Cannes Lions festival in France this week, Facebook’s global chief marketing officer Antonio Lucio said the corporate is trying to further unify its services.
Facebook desires to make its ownership of the other apps much more clearly to users,
he said — and the email change is a component of efforts to strengthen the core corporate brand.
The social network plans to make employees of its non-core services — photo-sharing platform
Instagram, messaging app
WhatsApp, and virtual reality firm oculus — transition to a @fb.com
email addresses, ditching the service-specific email addresses they have traditionally used (@instagram.com, @whatsapp.com, or
@oculus.com).
For years, Facebook has been content to keep its numerous apps at arm’s
length, operating as independent team with significant autonomy ( and even
separate bathrooms). However more recently, the $535 billion
company is making an attempt to
exert more centralized management, sometimes provoking tensions and concerns among employees.
This move to scrap separate emails provides fresh insight into how Facebook is trying to
drive internal unity among its disparate teams, alongside its
efforts to make its public-facing
services more cohesive.
The cofounders of Instagram and WhatsApp
have successively left
the Silicon Valley tech giant over the past few years, with numerous reports pointing to tensions between them
and Mark Zuckerberg as the 34-year-old billionaire chief executive has pushed to integrate
the services more closely.
Instagram and WhatsApp are currently being
tied intimately into Facebook, with an ambitious multi-year plan to allow users to send messages between the various apps and messenger.
“We need to begin to
give Facebook attribution for the ownership of the family of apps,” Lucio said. “So today, we have 5targets. You have employees, consumers, clients, the press, and policy makers. Pretty much of the 5, four understand
that we own the other apps. The consumer doesn’t, yeah. The levels of awareness, depending on the country that you are in the in the world, are totally different. We wish to be significantly more proactive in letting everybody know that all these apps are a part of the same family, as
well as things like oculus.”
He added: “So what you’re going to see us do is within the product experience,
and eventually in advertising, bringing
considerably more attribution
to the Facebook brand from
everything that’s happening.”
The changes illustrate how, at a time when the Facebook’s app’s name is more and more battered whereas its other apps flourish, the corporate is determined to reassert its ownership over all its merchandise — both in public and privately.