Facebook forces all users over to Facebook.com e-mail addresses
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/#facebook
(Click the "Contacts and calendars", and see that contacts can have multiple addresses, even with Facebook sync.)
Do you care at all if it something Androidish? Something from MS? From anyone except Apple? If no, then shut your hypocritical mouth.
It would be great if someone would check this, though.
That's surprising.
On my Windows phone, if I have a Windows Live contact (the base contact saving system) with an email, and then port in Facebook contacts that match, it merges the accounts into one "profile" and it doesn't overwrite emails; it saves both emails and tells me where each one came from. Maybe if Android had a better system, this wouldn't have happened?
It's not Facebook's job to take something like that into account.
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
(obviously Myspace did not read mail ;-))
[EDIT]
In response to http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=patrickaljord below, Myspace introduced email service in mid-2009. Perhaps the above should read, ``(obviously Myspace did not read mail back then when it mattered ;-))''
Except that it can http://www.myspace.com/guide/mail
I understand that they want to read my mail. They want to know who i interact with.
Why make such a shitty mail client? No POP. no IMAP. Can't view headers. It's not clear how much html is allowed, because they're dropping to many messages.
They're not even pretending it's a serious offering. They're just screwing around with settings.
edit
-- mail lag is 30 minutes now --
<b> <u> and <i> work, <font> and <span> failed.
Incidentally, I once missed facebook asking me to interview because their message ended up in that folder.
Obviously you can confirm that the real messages that you do receive gets through. What about those that didn't? How do you know that they didn't? How do you know no such messages exist?
Are you being naive here or am I missing some sarcasm?
My statement was about email forwarding from my domain... D:
There was an error removing the email: xxxxxxx@facebook.com
And then setup another public email which you will have to show to everyone instead. I'm pretty sure you didn't have to do that before.
But why do you put up with that?
Not having a Facebook account is starting to make me feel like an anti-social loser. But I just can't get over how creepy they are. How do other people live with that?
Pre Facebookitization of profile email addresses, if you wanted to communicate outside of Facebook or even begin to exit FB altogether, you had a ready means of staying in touch with at least those FB friends who displayed an email address on their profile.
Now, you are stuck with FB to stay in touch, unless/until you and each such friend exchange a non-FB email address or other means of contact.
P.S. As an example of the former, any time a FB friend wants to discuss a health-related issue, the first thing I do is take the conversation outside FB.
People love to complain, and people don't like change.
People will sit back, be quiet, and move along and Facebook will progressively march forward with the invasion and the general populace will scream about it until it's too late.
Aren't people allowed to voice opinions anymore? Specially when those opinions are shared with some post-IPO companies?
The latter is why folks are upset; simply hiding all listed emails, or adding in the @facebook emails on profiles, would probably not have generated as many complaints.
So, no, not exactly.
If you look at your list of e-mail addresses, it will let you choose who to share it with if it should be shown on timeline. Previously I had a real e-mail address that was being shared with friends and another real address that was for 'only me'. When I looked at my preferences today, I saw that those settings remained intact and that it added a third @facebook.com address that was being shared with only me.
I think the second field might be brand new. It says either "Shown on timeline" or "Hidden on timeline" and when I looked today it showed both of the email addresses that I had previously set up as hidden and the new facebook.com one as shown. If they would have just marked the e-mail address that I had set up to be shared with friends as "shown" and added the @facebook.com address as "shown", I (and suspect many others) would be happy and it would still allow them to emphasize that people can use @facebook.com e-mail addresses. (Some people might not like this for spam reasons, but I think this is would be far less evil than what they did.)
Also, since they don't share e-mail addresses via the social graph or have other ways of viewing data, what is the point of differentiating 'show on timeline' with specifying who you share it with? None of the other fields (phone number, IM screen name, address etc.) include this "show on timeline field" but rather set visibility based on the sharing settings. It seems like the "show on timeline" field is completely unnecessary and was only added to get the effect that we're all talking about. (So this was clearly evilness rather than incompetence; for some preference system changes one could argue that it was necessary to 'break' old preferences since the new ones were so different, but that isn't the case here.)
It's safe to assume that the vast majority of users fit this case: signed up with an email address, never added a second one.
Since it affects this use case.. I'm going to posit that this is quite widespread.
I also remember that I always disallowed Facebook from using a "fake" address in case some app wanted my email address.
I think this is just might be one of those things which would ticks us off as techies... but techies are the minority audience for sites like facebook.
Do emails sent to the facebook id go to the standard facebook 'message system'? If so, for a majority of people this will probably make sense... want to message somebody on facebook? You don't have to login to facebook! Email them at xyz@facebook.com. I didn't know you could do that, pretty sure a lot of other people didn't either. Now a lot of folks probably are updated about this feature.
In addition: non-techies who have accidentally exposed their private email id's will now have their facebook id's scraped instead... and the ones who exposed their private emails intentionally will change it back anyway.
However, all said and done... it could have been done differently.
There are easy ways to advertise this fact, without changing anyone's personal info in their Facebook account. It could be as simple as adding the text "You can also send messages to JaneDoe@facebook.com" to JaneDoe's profile page.
Don't bet on that!
You can argue people can already mass-message people, but now it's easier.
With 3rd party spam, the advantage Facebook has here is Zuck's "social graph" -- they can pretty easily tell what the relationship of the sender is in relation to the recipient (and thus how relevant the message is, what the sender's reputation is, etc). It'd be interesting to see how these connections are made when the sender's email address is not associated with a Facebook account, though.
You think FB isn't in (or aspiring to) negotiations with ConstantContact, CampaignMOnitor, MailChimp, etc.? Triangulating preferences, deep dives, data warehousing, you name it.
Local tabloids are discussing this. One their front-page. At least here in Norway. It's not just techies who cares.
Not saying the tracking isn't bad, just that the account linking had more to do with unifying the Google experience than tracking.
Then, early in Q1 2012, presumably as part of the whole G+ ecosystem push, they unified/changed their Privacy Policy terms across all (most?) services which users also had to accept.
Naturally as Google wanted to unite social strategies they shifted "Sharing on Reader" to "Sharing on G+". I don't see why that's shocking or terribly hard to cope with.
And most of all I don't know why me expressing that makes me a troll. Or are you just angry and unable to articulate yourself outside of calling me names?
The toolbar that is present across all services that is the G+ alert bar...
As well as the fact that by default all your use of all Google products would be captured. You have to opt out of all google tracking to turn that off.
While I wont call it being forced, it was an edict which you had plenty of time opting out from prior to it occurring...
If I remember correctly, on launch I suddenly had a profile that was rather cryptic to opt-OUT of and I somehow (despite never having added them) still PUBLICLY show up as a contact/friend of some guy I know who is using gmail and google+ and with whom I sent a few emails back and forth in the past.
Facebook at least manages to let me hide the facebook.com address.
Here's some discussion and a link describing how to fix it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157589
But on the other hand I'm seeing a lot of new Facebook email addresses in my contacts.
Update: A few hard refreshes later, the buttons started to work.
http://img29.imageshack.us/img29/1792/screenshot20120625at35...
If you hate it that much, delete the account :P
That said, I am enough of a luddite to not see the need to have a Twitter account.
I would argue a Twitter account is much more interesting than a Facebook account. Quite a few notable people have Twitter and they are mostly interesting or funny reads.
I'm still on the "old" profile, as are many (if not most) of my friends. Yet to see a hard push to switch over, though I'm sure it'll come any day now.
On a side note, I didn't do anything to keep the old display style, I just didn't manually switch myself to the new timeline, and they never auto adopted me over.
They keep laying little tripwires all over the place, trying to trick you into accepting Timeline, but if you are careful you can avoid them.
Think about Joe Average User who spends a bunch of time on Facebook. If people start emailing them at JoeAverageUser@Facebook.com, then they can scarcely abandon the site...
At least read the first comment to figure out which one to use.
Interestingly enough, even though I have an actual username set, my @facebook.com address is still the numbered user ID.
Case in point: a friend has already told me there have been renewed attempts to log into her account from other locations and devices.
I'm pretty sure they disabled this functionality so they can show the map instead which gets them more clicks into their site proper and helps their traffic. Really pisses me off because I take a picture every check in and think they are more interesting and don't think people should be forced into foursquare to view them and don't want to have to post them separately - then in their marketing material for the new face lift they even show a picture of a facebook post with a picture. Lies.
On the positive side, they'll be getting no data to mine since they already know what I do there.
To do this, you have to have public profiles. Do you want your personal email to show up on public profiles? But Facebook email, on the other hand, probably doesn't matter (at least not right now when the "open" paradigm is still in infancy.). Its OK to be shown to random people and search engines and other features that come down the pipeline.
I deleted that connection, yet still my email address has changed to this new facebook account.
Unhappy.
;)
I'd rather not delete that address because I do not want someone else to have it. But as it is now the email ends up in a subfolder of Messages called "Other" and I am in no way notified about them unless I happen to click on Messages and recognize the small unread count beneath "Other".
This is really useless.
The only unfortunate thing is that you cannot see emails to which you should have access to that are not marked as "Shown on Timeline". Complain about bad UX, not a security (in some ways) setting that is opt-in.
Facebook literally tried to hijack communications intended for me.
I have no doubts this is so they have one more metric to impress (number of emails exchanged thru Facebook). Then they will proceed to selling paid messages for advertisers.
A controlling psychopath or cult requires cutting off access to outside resources, preempting a possible escape path.
No different.
Facebook is circling the wagons on its user base. I see no one this benefits other than Facebook itself.
While promoting effortless and frictionless sharing of every last minute detail of daily life and thought within the Facebook "family", they are now very actively creating massive amounts of friction in order to prevent people from sharing with the same people anywhere else.
They are closing the exits in a defensive move to prevent people from leaving.
This is not good social behavior. This is what cults and psychopaths do in order to exert control.
This looks like the behavior of an entity with mal intent.
Years from now, when people say "remember 2010 and Facebook?" I'll remember. :-)
They changed the default e-mail address that appears in your profile. I'm happy about this. It means all my Facebook friends have a way of contacting me that isn't my primary e-mail address, meaning that type of communication is easily compartmentalized and thus taken care of.
Don't crave for a nicer walled garden. Instead start tearing down the walls.
I think it's easy to understate the importance of this, personally, and don't mind the multiple stories. I'm extremely annoyed at this - I don't want this email address, that I do not control, be published as some kind of contact point for me.