One really interesting thing about this: When I speak with my Facebook rep, he has brought up time and time again that Facebook basically believes email is fundamentally broken. They keep saying they are going to remove the offers ad unit (which derives most of its value from sending an email to the users sign in email address), because they see email as something people feel obligated to deal with. There's a clear focus within the company on becoming the default communication medium for the internet. Their attempt to purchase Snapchat and now the WhatsApp purchase seem to back that up too.
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.
Aside from the NSA liking that, and a lot of foreigners not trusting that, a lot of people in general have a distaste for Facebook. There are many reasons for this, which means there are many reasons why Facebook can collapse. What they say believe and the lack of understanding of how to apply a solution practically keeps being mirrored by Facebook's behaviours.
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?
That is obviously not true. For example, as soon as you have a contract with a for-profit enterprise where you are paying them actual money, they have legally actionable obligations to you in return.
Any private company will stop entering contracts for a particular service the moment that those contracts stop benefitting shareholders.
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.
This is not about a product not being profitable, but about an alternative strategy being more profitable, and an open system does indeed discourage choosing the alternative strategy, precisely because it prevents a single actor from being able to withdraw the product from the market.
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.
With email it all boils down to owning your email, on your own domain, with Gmail no less, speaking of which people had yahoo.com and hotmail.com accounts long before Gmail. And if you don't own the email address, it's painful to make a switch, though much less painful than switching from FB to something else.
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.
Yeah, the problem with gmail is not gmail itself, but rather its success. If everyone/a majority/too many people use(s) gmail, that puts google into a position where they would be able to change the system unilateraly, that is why I think it's stupid when people, in particular people who should know better, use gmail. Well, plus the fact that google has plenty of motivation to hinder privacy in emails because their business case is built on reading your emails, which makes it all the more scary that they could get into a position to dominate email.
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.
I find it reassuring that Google tried to do something similar before, when Google Groups attempted to take over Usenet, and people using real newsgroups had little time for either Google's "replacement" or for people who were accessing Usenet via Google Groups and thought everyone else should/must be as well.
Google groups was based on Google acquiring DejaNews and building a usenet archive and interface on top of that - mailing lists are a later addition. The usenet interface was (and I guess still is?) terribly broken, making it a pain for other usenet users to deal with posts from google groups users, because it simply works in a way that hinders interoperability with the rest of usenet.
(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.)
So basically every email provider, Google, and most of the internet has absolutely no user obligations? That's simply not true, even a cursory understanding of contract law would tell you that. Compensation does not have to be currency to form a valid contract with obligations.
They might be obligated to give notice and let you get your data out, but Google could absolutely remove features from GMail at its discretion. Providing a service doesn't make it obligated to continue providing that service forever.
Google's ToS (which you've agreed to) pretty clearly gives them this authority.
They have a contractual obligation to abide by their Terms of Service (that you sign when you sign up for Gmail) or notify you of changes to them. Not paying currency does not make a contract invalid. The fact that those ToS are broad and easy to amend doesn't remove the fact that there is a contractual obligation.
You're somewhat right but in practice, tempered considerably by the terms of service on most contracts? There are all sorts of restrictions, time / volume / price limits, acts of god clauses, etc. designed to avoid making permanent commitments which would lose significant amounts of money.
Sure, and then the next step is consumer protection laws that negate some of the common tricks to try and restore balance, and so the game goes on.
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.
> 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 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.
Only if their terms allow that, and usually if they do they will allow for reasonable notice so you can move to another provider if you wish. Unless your hosting service actually goes bust and disappears, which is a risk with anyone you ever deal with, you should be OK with any reputable hosting service as long as you own the domain that is acting as your identity so others can find you.
I never figured out what their thought process was with this feature. They didn't offer a traditional inbox, and there was no real effort to educate users on how the "Other" inbox worked. They rolled the @facebook.com email addresses out as the default public email address, which suggested they had a plan, but they never went any further.
@facebook.com was supposed to make people feel that all their electronic communication needs can be met by facebook. I'm guessing, it turned out people didn't mind that much logging into both their gmails/hotmails and facebook.
I personally think that people did mind, but they minded the fugly messages interface even more. Every HTML email had to open in a modal pop-up because it would get messed up by Facebook's internal styling.
From the WhatsApp's acqusition to closing down Facebook Messages, I think his talk back in 2010 makes sense.
"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.
Why does every definition of new future super cool messaging system imply "immediate". I quite don't like that. Not everything needs to be a chat and immediate.
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!
Also my thought: Are FB going to "unbork" all the displayed email values that they automatically and without user opt-in switched over to instead display these @facebook email addresses?
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.
2 days ago I was asked to respond to a survey on facebook and my opinions on the site. This ploy was one of my many gripes - I look forward to seeing the rest of my complaints actioned...
That's a shame. There's plenty of potential in email that's yet to be explored. Gmail was a great step ahead 10 years ago but it hasn't kept pace. Deep integration of email with web has yet to happen.
I doubt this is the end of Facebook trying email. With WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger they own the major alternative to SMS. WhatsApp is going to be launching voice support in Q2 meaning Facebook will own a large portion of voice calls. The only major communications left out are email. Unless their thought is 'email is dead' they will come back with a better product eventually, it's too big a hole to leave.
I don't have data, but I'm pretty sure email is all but irrelevant as a social tool from a today's teenager's perspective - something that "only old people use". I'm 29 and it's been years since I've sent a casual email to a friend...
Meanwhile, I send emails to my friends regularly. We live in different timezones/countries/..., and coordinating times for chat is difficult, so we end up exchanging emails every few weeks. Often, these emails contain multiple kilobytes of text, with snipped context to remind me of what the last topic was, fairly long descriptions of events, etc.
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.
But teenagers are no longer Facebook's core market. Teenagers are using Snapchat and other services like Instagram and WhatsApp more (that's why Facebook is buying them). Email still matters to people who started using Facebook as teenagers 10 years ago when email was still important.
Email is and continues to be important to many to receive a paycheck. I'm very quick to scold clients and other professionals I interact with who send me texts instead of email. I can see email being supplanted by tools like Basecamp, however, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Facebook start to go in that direction ("Facebook for the enterprise")
> I'm 29 and it's been years since I've sent a casual email to a friend...
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).
Since we're using personal perspectives without data, I'm 40 and haven't used email for that purpose for years as well. I think it's just a part of the cycle of stuff we use for whatever reasons.
Email in the current form has declining value today, but there's plenty of potential for innovation in email. Those claiming it to be irrelevant are simply twisting & sensationalizing the above fact.
Having not used this feature were messages sent to your @facebook.com address delivered into your FB messages box? Or somewhere else? I would assume the former, which actually sounds like a nice feature until.... you remember that Facebook is a walled garden, which means that people who would see/have access to your @facebook.com address could just ...message you on Facebook.
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.
They went to your "Other" inbox, which nobody ever checks. It's the same place messages from non-friends go.
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 dont get it. I really liked the single inbox idea, what I didn't understand is why they didn't just allow IMAP or oauth integration with gmail and tackle it that way, they already have messenger on my phone, they already have all my Facebook messages, the only thing left was email. Email addresses are ids. They dont change. Period.
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.
I'm late 20s if that is young to you then fine. I have a gmail which hasn't changed for some 10+ Years. Before that I had a hotmail account. Now I have my own domain and redirect everything to that. I won't ditch the gmail probably ever it is too hard to move everyone to the new address.
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.
Not even remotely true. Gmail may have become the largest webmail service, depending on who you ask, but Outlook.com / Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are still huge too. In many markets Gmail comes well down the list.
As someone who uses an email address that no longer exists to log into Facebook, I'm not sure what you're implying about the inexorability of email addresses. May I ask for an elaboration?
If I may jump in here, I believe lugg was suggesting that email addresses are much more longer-lived than another type of username you might use to log into a service.
Reasonable! I've just been through my fair share of primary email addresses over the years (be it from my ISP, university, or the webmail provider du jour), so the idea of an email address being forever unchanging was a bit incongruent with my experiences. :)
As usual the solution is to add a layer of indirection by getting your own domain name and then you can swap out backend email services without changing your address.
They don't want to provide you e-mail services, but they do want to read your e-mails. It seems they have found a way to read your e-mails and not be your e-mail provider.
I was just talking to someone about this service today. I don't think I ever tried it.
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.
Interesting that they didn't restore the old email addresses for people who kept it or didn't know their email showed up as *@facebook.com. Or at least it didn't seem like it from the profiles I viewed.
Because if they do that they will be unable to eavesdrop on your e-mail anymore, technically to forward an e-mail they have to receive it and resend. AFAIR SMTP protocol does not have redirects as HTTP does.
Well, good. Being assigned an email address I didn't ask for by the "we need to know all we can about you in order to optimise the pictures of baking your Aunt keeps posting" website never really drew me in.
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?
As the article says, they will forward it the email the user signed up with, which is of course required to use Facebook so your relatives must have one (even if they don't check it).
And now ask yourself a question why would they want to do that? I mean why keep unneeded load on their servers and support whole infrastructure just to forward e-mail. Probably because they want to continue to reading your e-mails but now they don't have to invest into storage. Just copy the interesting ones for themselves.
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.