Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"
readwriteweb.com
readwriteweb.com
Seriously, Facebook. Do one thing and do it well. Enough of this conquer-the-universe bullshit. I'm already at the point where I want to jump ship; I just can't figure out how to do it without losing contact with my friends. It's like you're using our own friends against us. Pretty slimy.
My reaction to Facebook trying to take control of my email was that Facebook can go jump in a lake (My language was actually much worse than that.) I'm already primed to leave. I'm just waiting on the right opportunity to come along.
I much prefer skewed and filtered representations of my friends.
It's much easier to interact with a caricatured, mean-field average of my 900 or so Facebook friends (aka "the audience") than to do it (shudder) one-on-one.
And those are people that I communicate with on a regular basis outside of Facebook, either by hanging out with them in person, or phone/email for the ones who have moved away. So there's no love lost with them by ditching Facebook.
That leaves the group of people that I knew from college and high school, but had nothing else in common so we lost touch until Facebook came around. I graduated from college 5 years before joining Facebook, and looking back I don't feel like my life was any worse off in those intervening years because I didn't have those people on an e-friends list.
Their end goal is to be the entire Internet in a curated show-you-only-what-you-agree-with-so-you-click-on-more-things model.
They won't stop or slow down until something else makes them irrelevant.
It's really weird to see Facebook working the other way round - a tiny company growing huge and grabbing more and more of the wider Internet.
What next? Facebook Video? Facebook VOIP?
(Ah, yes, here – facebook movie rentals: http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/09/business/la-fi-faceb... and they already offer video posting/sharing options in one's profile)
Over it's lifetime I think AOL made quite a lot of money. Just because something comes to an end doesn't mean that it "didn't work".
They apparently currently have a market cap of 2.6 billion so many years after their heyday I'm amazed they're still going.
I'm not quite sure how to word what I want to say.
The model of having a small contained network, with users doing everything on your computers, with a bit of access to the wider Internet, failed.
That's what AOL used to be. That model failed for AOL, and they converted to general ISP.
The electronic landscape in 1998 will be surprising to many people today - especially the eye watering prices.
(http://i53.tinypic.com/2janfrd.jpg)
My favourite quote from that page:
> "This is the computer industry as it used to be: people sharing ideas and solutions without the greed and grit with associated with today's corporate driven, litigation-laced, industry"
(remember this was written 23 years ago).
And so now, looking at Facebook, I see some similar features. They have their own email; their own "CB simulator"; etc.
If I had not explicitly signed-out of Facebook before visiting all these other sites, Facebook knows about it. And maybe also the browsing habits of people in my network. That gives a really deep profile about me - a lot more than just my demographics.
Recently there was an excellent article on ReadWriteWeb, about why Facebook terrifies Google: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebook_terrifies_...
Check out screen shots of their respective ad platforms in that article: the level of targeting that is possible with Facebook (which is only going to become deeper, given all the additional details they are gathering about me) is simply not possible with Google. This is one major reason why Google is pushing hard with Google+
Even if you have explicitly signed-out of Facebook, the presence of the like button on a site allows Facebook to track your movements on that site. Their like button javascript reports back a unique login cookie that is not erased when you sign off of Facebook. Pressing the like button is a small part of its purpose. Its purpose is to track you around the web as long as you have ever logged into Facebook before. This was all covered here on HN months ago, when I first learned of it.
To not play is to risk suicide.
Personally, my money is on Google winning out, although not my investments.
I so hope open data combined with web-intents and a slew of standardized service-negotiation protocols comes and solves this in a final, crushing, open move.
Want event-management? Fine. That's data. Stored in your calendar. Which can be stored and managed somewhere else, just loosely connected, with OAuth to make sure nothing bad happens.
Want participant-management for those events? Fine. That's data attached to your events. Which can use your contact-data as a source. Which can be stored and managed somewhere else, just loosely connected, to one or many services, with OAuth to make sure nothing bad happens.
Want photos tied to those events? That's data. You get the idea. There should be no need to consolidate all your stuff one place. We don't do it in real life and we shouldn't have to do it on the internet either.
I dream of an internet composed of micro-services of open data talking together, composing new wonderful things.
You use the service which you think does things best for the things it does best, and you use other services for things you think they do better. You put together your own cloud of services and data.
In this world, horrible and monolithic beasts like facebook are not only not needed. They are not wanted.
We just need to standardize. We just need to chisel out the semantics of how we hook services together in a way which normal users can handle.
This is the only true path I can see forward, which stays true to the roots of the internet. This is the one path maximizing freedom, choice and reliability through network distribution.
I so cannot wait to see it realized.
I remember that comic by the way, I have it saved from a calendar somewhere. :P
Well played, Facebook. Well played.
Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All > Facebook > Clear data & Clear cache
easy . . . call them, visit them, email them, write letters to them. you don't need an application to managed personal relationships.
"Hey, what's your new address?"
"I emailed it to you, go search through your messages"
vs
"Check my Facebook profile"
The thing that Facebook does well - is tracking down contacts - to add to your 'address book.' It's not so easy in the world of email. That's because we aren't publishing our address books publicly (probably for good reason.)
Some improvements and it would IMHO be as easy, if not easier, as opening Facebook, trying to find a contact and fight against the timeline to find the information you are looking for.
I think the party part is a bit of personal choice. If I run a party I want to notify $foo people. And $foo is always a smaller number than my Facebook "friends". I just prefer the ability to select people and only tell them what I want to say without creating tons of groups for everything.
Facebook can be a great tool for sharing photos and other things with your friends. But most of what is actually happening on Facebook is voyeurism -- you get to stalk people whom you sort of know.
You do when you're keeping in touch with friends you've made throughout your life and not just your current ones. That's the thing Facebook makes easy.
Also email and writing letters don't really work. If I sent a letter to a friend I seriously doubt they would bother responding, and most people I know personally don't use email. They use Facebook. That's the big problem - Facebook has replaced email for a lot of people making it one of the only ways (besides visiting/calling) to contact them.
Your friends are the current ones. Those other people aren't friends anymore, they're acquaintances, people you used to know but don't see anymore. Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis. If your only contact with a person is through facebook, they aren't your friends.
Replace the "friends" in his original post with "acquaintances," and his point stands.
Facebook is useful as a long term rolodex.
That's changing the argument, those words mean totally different things. My point is, Facebook makes keeping in touch with acquaintances easy, but isn't necessary to keep in touch with actual friends. Friends are people you see outside of Facebook.
Ask any of those less introverted people to name someone who's an acquaintance but not a friend, I bet they come up with a name showing that when pressed, they can make the distinction and do have different meanings for those words.
I do not believe there are people who cannot make that distinction.
Sure, you're concerned he was using "friends" too loosely. I'm saying you should give him a pass. It's of course up to you.
Your definition of friendship is outrageously shallow and is contrary to any other definition I have heard.
Ditto, where did I say seeing someone every day made them a friend? If it's this "it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis" that wasn't meant to qualify everyone you see daily as a friend.
> There is also a very small group of people that I see maybe once or twice a year that I would consider friends.
But you see them, which is my point. If your only contact with them is on Facebook, and losing Facebook would end your contact with them; they aren't your friends.
> Your definition of friendship is outrageously shallow and is contrary to any other definition I have heard.
I don't think you've understand what I'm saying well enough to say what my definition is since you've gotten it so clearly wrong.
>Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis.
In my post where I say "maybe once or twice a year" I am saying precisely that I do NOT see them on a regular basis.
It is not that I don't understand what you're saying, it is that you're not saying what you mean correctly.
He was right, nothing is different. It's like friends back in the 1800s exchanging letters. Doesn't mean that our friendship is less because we don't go out on Fridays and pound down a few pints.
In contrast, the people I work with, I spend far more time with, and interact directly with more frequently than my friend. Yet I wouldn't consider any of them friends.
It's you that's devalued the word IMHO, if you are codifying a 'friend' relationship with everyone you've ever met.
AFAICT there are only two ways to provide that basic feature:
(!) A centralized service like Facebook that manages the identity network. Any centralized organization is most likely ultimately going to exploit the fact that they own the network for their own gain, financial or otherwise.
or
(2) A decentralized service based on the similar cryptographic math as bitcoin, where every user gets one token representing their identity, and some sort of way to propagate changes to their identity signed by that token to everyone they are connected to and this needs to be accomplished in such a way that you can always re-establish the links to your friends in the network to be able to sync data.
I can't even begin to imagine how you'd develop the latter into a form that would be usable and therefore adoptable by the average person.
- tried-and-tested public key cryptography techniques
- using e-mail as a buffered delivery mechanism (everyone has an e-mail account that can store plenty of messages until they're next on-line)
- borrowing the typical DVCS copy-the-whole-repo approach so you've got distributed back-ups
- writing a native client for whichever platforms you wanted to support.
If someone wants to make money off it, come up with a neat physical way to connect something personal but memorable to keys of sufficient complexity to encrypt everything robustly: mobile app, USB device, whatever.
The only obvious limitation is physical bandwidth and storage capacity, which would make copy-the-whole-repo unsustainable if people kept sharing lots of photos/multimedia content but their friends don't want to "download" all of it. How much this will matter as data storage and communication network capacity increases is anyone's guess.
In the meantime, if you were willing to accept a delay you could have a request/reply system to fetch larger items, or someone could charge a modest sum of real money to people who want to use an actual centralised escrow-like system that is always available to their friends even when they're not on-line. The system doesn't need to be able to see into any content, just to act as a more real-time substitute for the default buffered transmission via e-mail.
PS it will be completely F/OSS, most likely GPL depending on contributor consensus.
But yeah, you've hit the nail right on the head. Obviously, my will fall into your (2) category, so we've got some major usability and cryptographic hurdles to tackle. But please rest assured that the solutions exist and that I've got most of them hammered out in my mind - the rest just require a little brainstorming and puzzle solving.
PS it will be completely F/OSS, most likely GPL depending on contributor consensus.
With #2 you'd still need trusted sources that can verify that a person i found via johndoe@acme.com or +1 (914) 555-1212 is in fact the owner of that email or phone number.
The rest is overthink.
I'm in the exact same boat, but I decided that the risk of losing contact with a few people I don't talk to often is worth it at this point. I've spent the last few days making sure everyone has my email address, phone number and google+ and will be deleting my account in about a weeks time.
There are many reasons why I am deleting my account, this issue (and their response to it) are just the latest problems that finally pushed me over the edge.
How many opportunities is it going to take?
Just try it out for awhile, I consider it pretty low-risk. "Deactivate" your account, it will still be there if you change your mind. I left two years ago, I don't miss it, and my relationships haven't suffered.
Last year I was at their HQ and one of the engineers was working with someone I knew on some code. The engineer said "send me a message on Facebook". So the guy sends it, and then the FB engineer said "I don't see it -- are you sure you sent it?" It took a few minutes before we all realized it had gone into the "other" section of the messages on Facebook. Not only that, but there were about 70 unread messages in there. We all laughed over the fact that even someone who writes a lot of the FB codebase didn't know those messages were there.
At least they use Yahoo! Messenger internally.
(Maybe my experience was limited to a pocket within Yahoo!)
I also used Google Search though I would try Yahoo! search every couple months. I don't believe the search engine is that much worse but I'd become accustomed to searching Google and understanding the results.
So, your email service works in this way that's completely unlike every other email service in existence (where all messages go to the inbox unless you tell them otherwise), and it's the users' fault for not understanding it?
Otherwise you get users complaining about spam in their messages.
It doesn't sound like "Other" was meant to be a spam folder. If that's the case why didn't they just call it "Spam" and install a spam filter to send mail there?
Also if you name the folder Spam, you're acknowledging that the Facebook system can have spam, which is probably something Facebook doesn't want.
Jesus, why didn't any of these anti-spam devices, programs, companies, etc think of it! We'll just make a per user white list and be done with it!
Oh wait, that's a horrible idea, and you should feel bad.
I never said everything in the Other page is spam. I am saying they decided to dump any message that isn't your friend or (friend of friend) into the Others page, which solved for them problem of users seeing "spam" in their Messages page but created other problems.
Either you're going to have a horrible false positive rate or a horrible false negative rate, because sender email address is a really poor feature to determine spam from ham.
Though if you're in a network for, say, the city you live in (imo silly to do this) then my 'fix' would become rather annoying unless the user was able to designate what networks go to Inbox and which go to Other. But then that just seems a little messy and overly complicated :)
(and perhaps a poorly designed email system though I haven't used it so I can't say personally)
Just a little notification along the lines of "You have x unread messages in your 'other' folder", perhaps only once a week, would have gone a long way in solving this.
I think it's also worth noting that I have had no issues on Windows Phone. I don't remember how contacts work on Android (never owned an iPhone) but on Windows Phone, it displays ALL of their emails. So the UI would look something like this:
John Smith
-Call John
-Text John
-Email John (john@gmail.com)
-Email John (john@college.edu)
-Email John (john@facebook.com)
So while it's true that if I only have a contact's details through Facebook Connect that I will only have their Faceobook email, is that really so common? Most people (even from Work - indeed ESPECIALLY from work) that I email from my phone I have as a PHONE contact. Even if I have the phone's contact linked with the FB contact, it will display both emails. And if I'm emailing someone from work and I don't have them on my phone then I usually look them up through Exchange rather than Facebook...
Just my $0.02. Not trying to say that this is not an issue, just trying to show how:
1. Apple seems largely to blame? (correct me if I'm wrong)
2. The way UI works on my phone makes this mostly a non-issue and I'm curious as to how other phones handle "multiple emails per contacts". I'd imagine it's rather similar.
Do you want to get a notification every time someone updates their email? Or do you want the emails your phone knows for people to just automatically stay up to date on their own?
One approach would be something targeted at dating and meeting people who share your preferred activities, while letting you manage how much of your real identity you want to reveal. Think Second Life meets FourSquare, with avatars, pseudonyms and various exaggerated expressions of individuality.
Another approach would be something for sharing information privately with a group of existing friends, building group identity. Think private clubhouse.
But a Facebook spokesperson said the missing messages may stem from confusion over how Facebook’s mail system categorizes messages
Baffled, I never noticed its existence !
This and the fact that my FB homepage (stream ?) is somehow useless nowadays, I don't see a great future with Facebook.
<http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continu...;
Until then you're just complaining about a product you refuse to stop using.
Thus you continue to use it, given several alternatives, as the best of a bad bunch (because no-one uses the others).
This never bodes well.
Facebook's e-mail debacle: One 'bug' fix, but rollback impossible
That was a slap in the face. Thanks for absolutely nothing Facebook.