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This 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 adv

This 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I'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
- quizbiz 16y ago
  I think you're onto something and I think what we're seeing is the resurgence of portals on the web. Reddit and Hacker News are niche content portals. Facebook is in a position to be a mass market portal to the entire web. Competition is a matter of time and people's purpose driven browsing will continue to push people to various sources. I'm not sure what you mean by an open competitor.
  - mtw 16y ago
    he means projects like diaspora
Joakal 16y ago
Yes, have browsers improve the MailTo feature. For example FF has a list of passwords, why not an address book or build open access with the user's email provider? eg, a Gmail user clicking on it shows a list of contacts in email address book by Gmail. As MailTo stands, it's pretty useless.
pstack 16y ago
I can't wait until Facebook has some catastrophic outage and everyone's single point of failure bites them in the ass. I mean, seriously, if you just want to hand over all communications to a company like Facebook, then . . . well, whatever. But honestly, how is it a "feature"? It's not exactly hard to open a new email and paste a URL into it. I do it pretty much every day. I can even simply copy and paste part of the content into the email to give it context. Or comment on it. Best of all, it's between me and the recipient. Not me, the recipient, and Facebook. And Facebook's advertisers. But hey, if everyone is so eager to hand the keys over to Facebook, let's do away with all the needless layers of "not facebook". Why even have websites anymore? Just have Facebook pages. And instead of email and IM, the whole world can just use Facebook. And instead of your own address book and resume, you can just use Facebook's address book and resume. After all, it's not like the internet was built on some stupid concept like diversification or anything.
FaceKicker 16y ago
> This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet. Will it really though? My feeling (based completely on anecdotal evidence) has always been that pretty much NOBODY ever uses these social buttons (that button strip on every website with Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.) on websites unrelated to social networking. Is my feeling wrong or is there some reason to believe that users will change their behavior in the future?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
thwarted 16y ago
I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people. Who remembers email address? You type in the first few letters of the person's name, and your email client should give you autocomplete, on both the email address and the real name.
- mattdeboard 16y ago
  Except not everyone is a practical hacker. I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? No she's got some silly email address, something about the army..."
  - thwarted 16y ago
    I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? Assuming your older relative is named Terri, you might, which is why I said "real names".
  - devicenull 16y ago
    Most mail clients let you associate a real name with an email address, so that's not really an issue. Thunderbird (and probably others) even capture incoming names/emails and let you use them.
    - GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
      Thunderbird? Seriously dude thats back in '99. I have yet to meet ONE person who outside of the office uses outlook/tb/anything who is also not a hacker. (iPhone/Android/etc does not count, and even on those they use the gmail app). Sure some use hotmail, some gmail, some migrating to gmail but overall gmail does a good job with this stuff. The real advantage of facebook is that instead of YOU filling in personal info about your friends, your friends do that for you. And vuala, instant address book management.
      - 16y ago
chopsueyar 16y ago
ISPs can start throttling Facebook traffic.

Hipchan 16y ago

I 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 ago
I'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
quizbiz 16y ago
I think you're onto something and I think what we're seeing is the resurgence of portals on the web. Reddit and Hacker News are niche content portals. Facebook is in a position to be a mass market portal to the entire web. Competition is a matter of time and people's purpose driven browsing will continue to push people to various sources. I'm not sure what you mean by an open competitor.
- mtw 16y ago
  he means projects like diaspora

Joakal 16y ago

Yes, have browsers improve the MailTo feature. For example FF has a list of passwords, why not an address book or build open access with the user's email provider? eg, a Gmail user clicking on it shows a list of contacts in email address book by Gmail. As MailTo stands, it's pretty useless.

pstack 16y ago

I can't wait until Facebook has some catastrophic outage and everyone's single point of failure bites them in the ass. I mean, seriously, if you just want to hand over all communications to a company like Facebook, then . . . well, whatever. But honestly, how is it a "feature"? It's not exactly hard to open a new email and paste a URL into it. I do it pretty much every day. I can even simply copy and paste part of the content into the email to give it context. Or comment on it. Best of all, it's between me and the recipient. Not me, the recipient, and Facebook. And Facebook's advertisers. But hey, if everyone is so eager to hand the keys over to Facebook, let's do away with all the needless layers of "not facebook". Why even have websites anymore? Just have Facebook pages. And instead of email and IM, the whole world can just use Facebook. And instead of your own address book and resume, you can just use Facebook's address book and resume. After all, it's not like the internet was built on some stupid concept like diversification or anything.

FaceKicker 16y ago

> This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet. Will it really though? My feeling (based completely on anecdotal evidence) has always been that pretty much NOBODY ever uses these social buttons (that button strip on every website with Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.) on websites unrelated to social networking. Is my feeling wrong or is there some reason to believe that users will change their behavior in the future?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

thwarted 16y ago

I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people. Who remembers email address? You type in the first few letters of the person's name, and your email client should give you autocomplete, on both the email address and the real name.

mattdeboard 16y ago
Except not everyone is a practical hacker. I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? No she's got some silly email address, something about the army..."
- thwarted 16y ago
  I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? Assuming your older relative is named Terri, you might, which is why I said "real names".
- devicenull 16y ago
  Most mail clients let you associate a real name with an email address, so that's not really an issue. Thunderbird (and probably others) even capture incoming names/emails and let you use them.
  - GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
    Thunderbird? Seriously dude thats back in '99. I have yet to meet ONE person who outside of the office uses outlook/tb/anything who is also not a hacker. (iPhone/Android/etc does not count, and even on those they use the gmail app). Sure some use hotmail, some gmail, some migrating to gmail but overall gmail does a good job with this stuff. The real advantage of facebook is that instead of YOU filling in personal info about your friends, your friends do that for you. And vuala, instant address book management.
    - 16y ago

chopsueyar 16y ago

ISPs can start throttling Facebook traffic.