Facebook - The Send Button, Because Sometimes It’s Private
developers.facebook.com
developers.facebook.com
It seems Tim Berners Lee's worry about the effect of Facebook towards less open Internet is getting more true than ever. Are there significant actions we can do about this?
Large Internet email providers (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail) should come up with something similar like address auto-fill on third-party sites (with appropriate security & privacy implementation). They might even want to team up to counter Facebook's rise--after all, Facebook is now one of their largest competitors on the Net. (I am aware that Microsoft is an investor and partner of Facebook; so Hotmail might be less likely to come on board.)
Which is fantastic, except that it's Facebook.
Support an open competitor.
This may evolve such that Facebook becomes more open as demand for openness increases, or there could be a Diaspora-like force that blows the closed-garden open, but like the online services of the 80s and 90s I think that openness will out. Facebook's challenge is to stay ahead of this curve such that their garden appears to be more open than it is in order to stem attrition, but there are still lots of people who aren't interested in likes or tweeting or any other form of information-disgorgement toward a private company. Couple this with possible (and possibly inevitable) privacy breaches and Facebook remains vulnerable. Think of where Google was five years ago and where they stand today, as a less-than-total (and possibly decreasing) presence.
There is an ebb-and-flow to these developments, and Facebook users constitute thin-clients in the continuing historical battle between centralization and nodal power.
EDIT: clarified 'thin-client' relationship
Competition is a matter of time and people's purpose driven browsing will continue to push people to various sources.
I'm not sure what you mean by an open competitor.
As MailTo stands, it's pretty useless.
Will it really though? My feeling (based completely on anecdotal evidence) has always been that pretty much NOBODY ever uses these social buttons (that button strip on every website with Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.) on websites unrelated to social networking.
Is my feeling wrong or is there some reason to believe that users will change their behavior in the future?
Who remembers email address? You type in the first few letters of the person's name, and your email client should give you autocomplete, on both the email address and the real name.
I have yet to meet ONE person who outside of the office uses outlook/tb/anything who is also not a hacker. (iPhone/Android/etc does not count, and even on those they use the gmail app). Sure some use hotmail, some gmail, some migrating to gmail but overall gmail does a good job with this stuff.
The real advantage of facebook is that instead of YOU filling in personal info about your friends, your friends do that for you. And vuala, instant address book management.
For the last part I agree the with the pro you mentioned, but it is also a con, with following possible cases where it breaks down:
- they won't show all of their info to you
- you don't care about all of it, only a subset
- they did not update their info correctly
- not everyone uses Facebook to the same extent, if at all
Having a consolidated address-book you manage, regardless of what service you use to interact with each of your contacts. Besides I can normalize the data the way I want.
That said, it would be interesting to have Facebook and others as an available source (among many others) to an address-book. Of course I suppose Facebook won't ever expose it as an LDAP endpoint of sorts.
Exposing your address book via a method that allows you to consume it programatically and thereby make it more useful? We wouldn't want to enable competitors because we obviously can't continue to exist or be relevant using any method other than locking people in.
Assuming your older relative is named Terri, you might, which is why I said "real names".
Ok I tried the product and here are my suggestions:
1) Use Google Connect/Yahoo or something so that you can access my Contacts list
2) It is the same as opening a browser window with email app since the contacts are not there already or shown in a dropdown.
3)The problem is not that I have to move away from the page to share it. The pain comes in moving away and doing stuff. If I have to move away to find that one email id, it is of no use.
4) Who would save Contacts in a seperate list? No CSV Upload is not the solution.
2) The contacts are there when you add them, so you just click them. Have you tried the "Contacts" page?
3) You don't have to move away, the bookmarklet appears in a lightbox. Are you sure you aren't just using the "Send" page?
4) This is true, but this is more targeted to a few of your friends rather than everyone, and adding everyone would clutter the list more than help, I think...
Thanks for the feedback!
Houses for sale and homes you're going to a party at are rarely appropriate "Like" candidates.
We haven't done any PR/promotion work and I want to ask your comments about how should we compete against the Goliaths?
I just wish they'd figured out a way to combine the two.
Or because of the difficulty in hooking mailto: links to webmail services?
This was something ideally Google should have come up with but never mind!
I'm in the process of growing it, and its users find it extremely useful so far, after they get past the "why can't I just email them?" stage and see that this is much faster.
If anything, Facebook's move provides me with a clear way to position the product, rather than have to say "it's a bit easier than email".
Also I will give it a shot and suggest if there is something that can be improved (at least from an experience perspective). You can of course take it or ignore it too.
1) Use Google Connect/Yahoo or something so that you can access my Contacts list
2) It is the same as opening a browser window with email app since the contacts are not there already or shown in a dropdown.
3)The problem is not that I have to move away from the page to share it. The pain comes in moving away and doing stuff. If I have to move away to find that one email id, it is of no use.
4) Who would save Contacts in a seperate list? No CSV Upload is not the solution.
or maybe the advantages are not clear at all. everyone can already share links through skype, msn or email or facebook so it's not clear why they'd need yourpane
I know the feeling of working so hard on a project and then apparently nobody notices. It doesn't mean your idea or vision sucks, starting a service takes determination. Applies to 99% of developers, and only 1% gets on the frontpage of HN, because they took a lot of time to craft simple and efficient copy and design, and also took a lot of time to think about the features
The purpose of the service is to complement IM, for when you want to share things with people who aren't on IM right now or don't want to be bothered (or sharing with multiple people). You send a link to the people you want, they get to it on their own time.
A crucial feature that is sort-of missing is the ability to comment on links, because sending links is an inherently social act. I'll work on this more if people start using the service, but there are a few problems due to the way the service works.
But a mailto: link should pop up your default mail client - which does know your friends email addresses:
mailto:?subject=cool%20link&body=Here%20is%20a%20cool%20link%20to%20http://example.com
i.e. it should do exactly this if set up correctly.
So - is this really just that most clients don't have mailto: configured to launch the application which knows the email addresses of their friends?