Facebook quietly ends email address system
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Not really commenting either way on whether or not it's a smart strategy, just that it's been interesting to think about while watching their decisions.
It seems like WhatsApp or snapchat would immediately become heavy obligations as soon as they contained any sort of 'official' message or even an advertisement.
Can you imagine medical billing software sending you updates through any of these communication products? What about that Facebook advertisement bullshit prodding you to buy an engagement ring because you've been in a relationship for a year?
In the email - you list down all the participants, subject and body which really helps in getting your message across
People come and go, the email system stays, eventually outliving Facebook, too. :)
I wouldn't be surprised if they'll make a U-turn and offer email again in the future.
This is true of every for-profit enterprise. Why direct it against Facebook in particular?
The societal value (portability, privacy, openness, etc.) of a product doesn't stop anyone from withdrawing it the moment it stops being profitable. This is what I take to be parent's issue with Facebook in this case.
To continue doing something because it's good for users (even when it's not good for shareholders) you need a nonprofit or a government (or very altruistic shareholders.) USPS is an example of this - it's not profitable to serve rural areas at such low prices, but the government does it anyway while corporations won't/can't.
With email (well, email before people were stupid enough to use gmail), if a single provider withdraws their email offering from the market, that does not really have much of an effect on the system as a whole, the affected users just switch to a different provider and email overall just continues to work as it always did - which in turn should discourage companies from withdrawing their email offerings in favour of their proprietary offerings, as they would expect people to switch to a different provider rather than to their proprietary offering.
Well, in practice, though, people just seem to be too stupid to understand such basic economic realities as network effects and the effects of monopolies/dictatorships/other concentrations of power and what the long-term effects of those are, and so facebook and twitter do actually have users, so something about that theory must be wrong, I guess.
There is a big difference between email and FB - people depend on email on a daily basis, especially for work. When 2 people exchange contacts, what do they exchange? Their phone and email of course. Do you give out your FB or Twitter handle to people?
Email is reliable, everybody has an email address and everybody with an email address can communicate with you. My father doesn't have the patience to be on FB, he can barely use a laptop or his phone, but he does use email.
My point is - these new platforms for communication will never replace email and I also believe that because of the lock in, FB and Twitter and G+ will never be so relied upon as to be irreplaceable. This lock in these bring is also their weakness.
Other than that: Oh, I hope you are right! But don't underestimate network effects - people were also stupid enough to let Microsoft lock them into word documents, which indeed were practically irreplacable for quite a while, and to a degree still are.
(And while at it: The mailing list feature is also quite defective, obviously built by people who don't really have a clue how email works.)
And for mailing lists it could be better, but as a user of several mailing lists of various open-source projects, I have had no problems.
I am noticing that Google doesn't work in our interests though. For example I am disappointed by their shitty support for IMAP, CalDav and CardDav.
However, few if any of these protections typically apply to someone who is using a service for free, such as people with Facebook accounts. As soon as real money is changing hands, it becomes much harder for the recipient of that money to get away with not keeping up their side of the bargain.
Someone who has in the past exchanged real money with Verizon, Comcast and AT&T, I would again submit that the situation is not as simple as you're saying.
I'd be the first to agree that it's not that simple, and that the legal system in many places is not a very effective tool for providing justice in "low value" cases. But even then, there may be consumer representative bodies or government regulators that maintain dedicated funds to pursue bad actors in such situations, possibly through other means. In places like the US, you also have the possibility of class actions if a large organisation is taking advantage of the imbalance to harm lots of customers a little bit each.
Are you actually suggesting that consumer protection laws should prevent businesses from cutting features and discontinuing products?
Of course not. But if, for example, you're paying for a deal where someone hosts your domain and e-mail for a year, and where the domain is to be held in your name so you can transfer it to another provider if you wish, you are obviously entitled to have that hosting for the year you paid for and to your escape mechanism with the domain name if either party chooses not to renew the deal later.
With a system like Facebook or Google Mail, you have little recourse if they decide arbitrarily to close the business down tomorrow, and you have no control over your identity on that system or what would happen to it after any changes.
Google's ToS (which you've agreed to) pretty clearly gives them this authority.
"We don't think modern messaging system will be email," he noted, saying that he believes seven characteristics that we will come to define "next generation" messaging: seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple, minimal, and short.
(http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addr...)
He hasn't given up his dream of becoming the leader in mobile, seamless messaging/communication.
Just put your phone in your pocket when you want to stop replying immediately!
Why!? I compose long emails for a reason! I can't get my point across in short messages sometimes! I might be explaining a long and complex story with some backstory!
To me, it seemed an obvious ploy to keep user and their friends further captured within FB. Want to contact a friend out-of-band? Well, now (i.e. then) even though that friend chose to make their email address visible to you, you effectively no longer have it; you instead have this FB email address that forces you to remain within FB for this communication and until you manually request and receive that friend's "real" email address.
Now, supposedly emails to that FB address will silently forward to the person's "real" (registered) email address. You still don't, in these cases, actually have that address; everything still passes through FB, and you are dependent upon FB doing the right thing (or not) both morally and technically in forwarding your email on.
I'm not saying they won't. But the whole endeavour has become a mess that apparently stemmed out of the business' self-interest -- as opposed to the user's interest -- in keeping users "trapped" within its domain.
P.S. And would they do so correctly, reverting displayed addresses where the prior address values had been displayed to others, but not doing so where they had not been or had been displayed to a different set/group that current -- some people may have been comfortable displaying an @facebook.com email address once those became available but not their "real", personal email address.
Now it's back again, in Whatsapp clothes.
I've noticed the same thing. I exchange emails with a few friends, but it's generally only to swap links for a "read later" purpose (if it was "read now", they'd be sent over xmpp).
Even for the people I share a house with, we found that email with a mailing list is the most effective way to post notifications to everyone, send reminders, etc.
I haven't come across a serious rival to email for those use cases.
This almost seems like a feature for non-FB users to get in touch with you via Facebook (while also obscuring your "real" address). I know the idea of "following" is a new-ish FB feature, but I wonder the timing of that was too late to give this feature any traction.
Actually, now that I look at it, there's a message from somebody who found my wallet once. Fortunately he also discovered me on LinkedIn, or I would never have noticed.
I am guessing you are very young. I remember back in the 90s when your email address was provided by your college or your workplace, and when you moved on, you lost it, you didn't even get to set up a forwarding. If two people happened to move in between updating their address books, then they simply lost touch. Phone numbers where similarly ephemeral; landlines were only portable within an area code, mobiles within a single network. And of course postal addresses too, people were moving every year at college, then every few years with work, including overseas. Keeping track of how to contact people was a tedious and error prone process.
The radical thing about FB for now-30-somethings is that this problem simply went away.
Yeah, cause everyone has Gmail.
"Everyone" in the tech world has Gmail.
My father has had the same email address for some 20 odd years I had to find a redirection solution for him so he could switch off of a now poorly priced ISP. His reasoning for not changing: I would have to update every single one of my clients and force them to change my contact details. That's just not going to happen.
I had a feeling my remark might get this kind of response but didn't really want to get into it during my post. Sure there are exceptions, I've changed over the years too, but in reality a lot of people out there are not in a position to jump ship with their email addresses, they are tied into everything they interact with online.
> Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of email in 2010.
When it launched I still actively used Facebook, but it was a slow rollout and I didn't have access at that time. Since then, I've stopped using Facebook for almost everything and after the initial launch, all but forgot about it.
The recent purchase of WhatsApp however, reminded me of their email service and I remarked how reminiscent it was of the move in the late 90's from email to IM.
I'm sort of surprised that they are retiring it entirely as I thought they'd use the messaging app to drive higher adoption rates of their email service, akin to Hangouts integrating with GMail. I thought it would actually be a good strategy. I guess it's hard to convert the masses to another email system when most users are probably happy with what they've already got.
It always seemed like a baffling idea to try and run out in the world, especially as to get a Facebook account you need an email address.
I use this to send emails to a couple of older family members who are happy using Facebook but don't use any 'real' email address. Is there any chance they'll keep some forwarding option around?
Unfortunately my grandmother never quite figured out email but she's very comfortable with Facebook.