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One of the engineers behind this is a YC Founder of this company: http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/sendoid-finally-sharing-big...

This is likely an attempt by motivated individuals inside an unstructured place like Facebook to get a feature they want out to the public, and less driven by some PM who wants to compete with others.

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I'm the engineer mentioned here. Its nice people actually remember my startup. :)

Facebook is definitely a place that lets engineers run with ideas, and it is that environment that allowed us build this out as something engineer created, designed, and driven.

I will acknowledge the PMs on the relevant product teams were all great to work with at the points they became involved and understood the problem we were hoping to solve here.

I was wondering if facebook wanted to hide more of their users activity from competitors. I know a lot of my friends get all notifications (or used to) as emails and auto archive those, essentially giving google insights into their entire Facebook presence. Something Facebook obviously don't want to give away.

Your theory seems much more likely, given the probable adoption of this feature :)

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