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Facebook Acquires Fb.com, Set to Launch E-mail Service

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It has been revealed that Facebook has acquired the Fb.com domain. This news comes href="http://mashable.com/2010/11/11/facebook-announces-special-event-is-it-about-to-overhaul-messages/">just days before its special event, where it is set to reveal an overhauled version of Messages that works like e-mail.

In September, the American Farm Bureau sold the Fb.com domain to an undisclosed buyer. Looking up the domain’s href="http://www.whois.net/whois/fb.com" >whois reveals that MarkMonitor, a brand protection and domain management company, is the Fb.com’s registrar. However, href="http://domainnamewire.com/2010/11/12/confirmed-facebook-acquires-fb-com-domain-name/">Domain Name Wire has revealed that the domain’s whois has been updated to reflect that Facebook is the domain’s administrator.

A recent report from href="http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-currently-using-fb-com-internally-2010-11">All Facebook claims that Facebook is using Fb.com internally, but doesn’t quite know what Facebook intends to do with it. At the same time, href="http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/12/facebook-to-start-an-e-mail-service/?src=twt&twt=nytimesbits" >The New York Times and href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/facebook-gmail-titan/" >TechCrunch claim that the company’s impending Messages overhaul will utilize the Facebook.com domain for user e-mail accounts.

What does that mean for Fb.com? Most likely, Fb.com will become the e-mail domain of the company’s 1,400+ employees. Yahoo does something similar; its staff uses @yahoo-inc.com e-mail addresses instead @Yahoo.com in order to avoid confusion between its employees and the hundreds of millions of users of its e-mail service.

Here’s our question: do users really want a @Facebook.com e-mail address? Would they actually use it in conjunction or in place of their current e-mail addresses? Let us know what you think.

/>Reviews: href="http://www.blippr.com/apps/336650-Facebook" >Facebook

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