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- Facebook is making its Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus employees get new @fb.com email addresses, Business Insider has learned.
- Facebook’s family of apps have historically been able to operate semi-independently, but it is now moving to integrate them ever-more closely together.
- Facebook’s global chief marketing officer Antonio Lucio said in an interview that Facebook also plans to make the fact that it owns the other apps clearer to users.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Facebook is making Instagram and WhatsApp employees adopt Facebook-themed email addresses as the social network attempts 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 company is looking to further unify its services. Facebook wants to make its ownership of the other apps much more clear to users, he said — and the email change is part 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 historically used (@instagram.com, @whatsapp.com, or @oculus.com).
For years, Facebook has been content to keep its various apps at arm’s length, operating as independent team with significant autonomy (and even separate bathrooms). But more recently, the $535 billion company is attempting to exert more centralized control, sometimes provoking tensions and concerns among employees. This move to scrap separate emails provides fresh insight into how Facebook is attempting 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 various 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 now 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 five targets. You have employees, consumers, clients, the press, and policy makers. Pretty much of the five, 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 different. We want to be significantly more proactive in letting everyone know that all these apps are part of the same family, including things like Oculus."
He added: "So what you’re going to see us do is within the product experience, and eventually in advertising, bringing significantly more attribution to the Facebook brand from everything that’s happening."
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Source: Business Insider – rprice@businessinsider.com (Rob Price)