Facebook recently launched a feature that enables developers to request a user’s primary Facebook email address:

We’re excited to announce that you will soon have the ability to ask users for their primary Facebook email addresses, providing you with a direct channel to communicate with your users. This will also serve as a replacement for application-to-user notifications.

All of the nerdy details are available on the Facebook Developer Wiki.  Screenshot here.

This is kind of a big deal for a few reasons:

Tighter Email/Social Integration

Share-with-your-network (SWYN) isn’t email/social integration.  At the end of the day, it is just the same mass of share chiclets at the bottom of a blog post.  Important, measurable, but old news.  Seamless address collection through social platforms?  Now that is an integration…

People are already programmed to share their email addresses with services they find useful.  I can’t imagine that app developers won’t see quick list growth shortly after they implement an email address ask step.  Low hurdle, low cost, familiar transaction for both sides.

Clearer Social Call To Action

Facebook fans/users are nice…but – let’s face it – email addresses are probably more valuable/engaged.  At least for now, anyway. Smart marketers will jump all over this opportunity by building a “share your email address” step into their Facebook presence, provided they’re already marketing through some sort of application. 

Address collection creates a clear conversion point along the social media marketing pipeline.  A user that hands over their email address is clearly more qualified than a user that doesn’t…

Visibility to social as a revenue generating channel.

Hopefully you’re already keeping tabs email’s abililty to ring the cash register.  If you can programatically construct social as an email feeder, then you should be able to similarly back into a value for the social channel.

Eric