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Facebook - The Send Button, Because Sometimes It’s Private
- zach 16y agoFantastic. This is just what I've been waiting for to implement on my location-based sites. Houses for sale and homes you're going to a party at are rarely appropriate "Like" candidates.
- glenjamin 16y agoI'm fairly amused that the blogpost itself doesn't feature a send button, just a "Like" button!
- simonw 16y agoI thought Facebook were phasing out XFBML?
- avree 16y agoYeah, it's a little confusing considering here (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/ http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fbml/) they mention that they are deprecating FBML and "won't be adding any new features".
- ccheever 16y agoXFBML is different from FBML
- matclayton 16y agoThey are phasing out fbml not xfbml.
- FiddlerClamp 16y agoWell, it's still sending data through Facebook. If you want to send things, why not put a bookmarklet to your email account in the bookmark bar of your browser?
- patio11 16y agoI can send email easily. My customers can't. Improving their ability to mail on my behalf might be a win.
- jbert 16y agoIs this useful because of the decline of email (pverty of address books)? Or because of the difficulty in hooking mailto: links to webmail services?
- tuhin 16y agoThis is useful because I cannot remember the emails of all my friends and also the default email share widget does not know them either. This was something ideally Google should have come up with but never mind!
- StavrosK 16y agoIt's what www.yourpane.com does, but when I submitted it here I got little to no love...
- tuhin 16y agoGetting no love on HN does not mean you or the product is not good. Being sad and pouty about it might. Move on, make it so big and good that someone else posts it on HN the next time instead of you doing it.
- StavrosK 16y agoIt wasn't my intention to be pouty, I just remarked on what happened. I'm in the process of growing it, and its users find it extremely useful so far, after they get past the "why can't I just email them?" stage and see that this is much faster. If anything, Facebook's move provides me with a clear way to position the product, rather than have to say "it's a bit easier than email".
- tuhin 16y agoSorry for being rude (if I was). I have that feeling too when I get no love for my ideas or comments or web projects. But I have learnt to put the narcissism behind me and take the bigger lesson. Which is: WHY did it happen? WHY did they not like it? Also I will give it a shot and suggest if there is something that can be improved (at least from an experience perspective). You can of course take it or ignore it too.
- nopinsight 16y agoThis 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.)
- Hipchan 16y agoI 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.
- rhizome 16y agoI'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
- CWIZO 16y agoThis feature sounds great on paper. But it means adding yet another FB dependency (or third-party if you will) to my web page, and that means more stuff for users to download. It also clutters the UI and placing it on a page can sometimes be a mayor PITA, depending on the layout of your page, and the last thing I want is to redesign parts of my pages yet again because FB released a new button. You can always choose not to use it, but we all know how that is with search-driven traffic. Now days if you don't have FB's like button it's like putting "Disallow: *" in your robots.txt. And it will (probably) be the same with this "send" button. I just wish they'd figured out a way to combine the two.
- StavrosK 16y agoYou can use www.yourpane.com, it does the exact same thing but with no installation necessary...
- StavrosK 16y agoShameless plug: If you like this functionality and don't want to wait for sites to implement it, use http://www.yourpane.com http://www.yourpane.com, it's a free alternative I wrote that doesn't rely on a webmaster installing it and you can view all the submissions in one place.
- revorad 16y agoI've used yourpane and like it. But I think the killer feature of Facebook Send is the inbuilt contacts list with auto-suggest. If you could let users import their address books into yourpane, that would be great.
- StavrosK 16y agoYep, I should do this as everyone seems to request it. I just need to be careful to note that you shouldn't import everyone, as it will clutter things up. Right now the best part is that you only see the 10-20 people you send things to frequently so you can just click on them rather than type anything.
- revorad 16y agoIs there a way to import only your top 10 contacts?
- jetz 16y agoWe've been developing a web app (http://tusulog.com http://tusulog.com) to address this "need" in addition to others. Our app allows your public timeline (like Twitter) and groups concept. You can have public, anon and private groups. Private groups are just like FB groups. Even if FB Groups seem to be more than sufficient, we think FB pages have become very cluttered. Furthermore, they couldn't have nailed it (I don't know why): 50m groups for 700m users is not much and humans communicate mostly by group/network basis. In other words, you don't speak to family the same you speak to school friends. We haven't done any PR/promotion work and I want to ask your comments about how should we compete against the Goliaths?
- trickjarrett 16y agoI implemented this button as soon as I read about it, I wish there was some way to track how much it is used.
- hailpixel 16y agoEnabling Facebook Insights for your site does just that: http://www.facebook.com/insights/ http://www.facebook.com/insights/. Just 'add' your domain.
- trickjarrett 16y agoOh wow! That's huge, I have no idea how I didn't know this.