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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 letter

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.
    - lloeki 16y ago
      Well, Google Mail does this too. For the last part I agree the with the pro you mentioned, but it is also a con, with following possible cases where it breaks down: - they won't show all of their info to you - you don't care about all of it, only a subset - they did not update their info correctly - not everyone uses Facebook to the same extent, if at all Having a consolidated address-book you manage, regardless of what service you use to interact with each of your contacts. Besides I can normalize the data the way I want. That said, it would be interesting to have Facebook and others as an available source (among many others) to an address-book. Of course I suppose Facebook won't ever expose it as an LDAP endpoint of sorts.
      - thwarted 16y ago
        Exposing it via a standard method, like LDAP, would be awesome, and I agree entirely unlikely considering the (passive aggressive?) stance Facebook and Google are taking on exposing that information. Exposing your address book via a method that allows you to consume it programatically and thereby make it more useful? We wouldn't want to enable competitors because we obviously can't continue to exist or be relevant using any method other than locking people in.

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.
  - lloeki 16y ago
    Well, Google Mail does this too. For the last part I agree the with the pro you mentioned, but it is also a con, with following possible cases where it breaks down: - they won't show all of their info to you - you don't care about all of it, only a subset - they did not update their info correctly - not everyone uses Facebook to the same extent, if at all Having a consolidated address-book you manage, regardless of what service you use to interact with each of your contacts. Besides I can normalize the data the way I want. That said, it would be interesting to have Facebook and others as an available source (among many others) to an address-book. Of course I suppose Facebook won't ever expose it as an LDAP endpoint of sorts.
    - thwarted 16y ago
      Exposing it via a standard method, like LDAP, would be awesome, and I agree entirely unlikely considering the (passive aggressive?) stance Facebook and Google are taking on exposing that information. Exposing your address book via a method that allows you to consume it programatically and thereby make it more useful? We wouldn't want to enable competitors because we obviously can't continue to exist or be relevant using any method other than locking people in.