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Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet. I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people.

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.)

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I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people.

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.

Except not everyone is a practical hacker. I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? No she's got some silly email address, something about the army..."

Most mail clients let you associate a real name with an email address, so that's not really an issue. Thunderbird (and probably others) even capture incoming names/emails and let you use them.

Thunderbird? Seriously dude thats back in '99.

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.

Well, Google Mail does this too.

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 it via a standard method, like LDAP, would be awesome, and I agree entirely unlikely considering the (passive aggressive?) stance Facebook and Google are taking on exposing that information.

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.

I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri?

Assuming your older relative is named Terri, you might, which is why I said "real names".

I think a social layer is inevitable, the way that people used to interact with websites purely through urls today is too impersonal. What Facebook is doing is creating a great abstraction layer to improve the UX of the web as a whole.

Which is fantastic, except that it's Facebook.

Support an open competitor.

I've thought for a long time that eventually there will be profile providers and network providers, to which you plug your profile information into with varying degrees of exposure.

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

I think you're onto something and I think what we're seeing is the resurgence of portals on the web. Reddit and Hacker News are niche content portals. Facebook is in a position to be a mass market portal to the entire web.

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.

he means projects like diaspora

Yes, have browsers improve the MailTo feature. For example FF has a list of passwords, why not an address book or build open access with the user's email provider? eg, a Gmail user clicking on it shows a list of contacts in email address book by Gmail.

As MailTo stands, it's pretty useless.

> This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet.

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?

ISPs can start throttling Facebook traffic.

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