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Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"
- aginn 14y agoSkynet is here
- 51Cards 14y agoOk, so in turn I would blame the "User Confusion" on Facebook's decision to change everyone's public facing email address (without warning or consent) which then pushed the email into a system many of the users have never even touched. (and perhaps a poorly designed email system though I haven't used it so I can't say personally)
- dkokelley 14y agoAt this point I think it should be obvious to Facebook that they are building and marketing a system that its users just don't want.
- arbitrage 14y agoAbsolutely. Users should demand their money back, too.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoI realise you're being sarcastic, but I wish I could get my time back from Facebook.
- dkokelley 14y agoI'm not saying that non-paying users have a right to expect certain features or not. I'm saying that Facebook is wasting their resources and creating features that users won't use at best, or will drive them away at worst.
- vegashacker 14y agoThe articles headline quotes "confusion", implying to me that Facebook used that word in their explanation. But the quote given in the article ("That is likely...") doesn't use the word "confusion"--and in fact, is a lot less incendiary.
- chris_wot 14y agoSo? The outcome is the same - users are confused due to the poor integration of Facebook email!
- alttab 14y agoAnd they wonder why no one wanted to use it in 2010.
- hornokplease 14y agoWhile the direct quote attributed to Facebook's rep doesn't include the word confusion, an earlier reference to Facebook's response to RWW does: But a Facebook spokesperson said the missing messages may stem from confusion over how Facebook’s mail system categorizes messages
- tehayj 14y agoThey were probably not holding it right!
- tadfisher 14y agoTip: If your new, undocumented system confuses the majority of your users, then it's not a problem with your users!
- Bobby_Tables 14y agoIf every user makes the same error, it isn't user error...
- tomrod 14y agoThis is almost the contrapositive to "it's not a bug, it's a feature!"
- imgabe 14y ago> “By default, messages from friends or friends of friends go into your Inbox. Everything else goes to your Other folder So, your email service works in this way that's completely unlike every other email service in existence (where all messages go to the inbox unless you tell them otherwise), and it's the users' fault for not understanding it?
- swang 14y agoFacebook knows most users don't want another email account that is just going to get filled with spam. So how does Facebook deal with spam? Simple, it puts it into your Others folder. Otherwise you get users complaining about spam in their messages.
- imgabe 14y agoMost users didn't want another email account period. They certainly didn't want Facebook to make that decision for them. It doesn't sound like "Other" was meant to be a spam folder. If that's the case why didn't they just call it "Spam" and install a spam filter to send mail there?
- wahnfrieden 14y agoThey do have a spam filter, and it sends items to Other.
- mayanksinghal 14y agoIt is not a spam filter. I just checked my "Other" after days and found a mail that was not spam but from a old friend that I had not accepted as a friend yet. It is not 'detecting' spam but marking everything not-from-facebook as unimportant.
- swang 14y agoTo clarify, what I meant was the Others folder is just their way of preventing Facebook Users from getting spam in their "Messages" page. Since no one really checks their Others folder, you don't get any spam. The side effect though is that the Others section _may_ have important messages, but Facebook can't risk having spam invade the "Messages" page. Also if you name the folder Spam, you're acknowledging that the Facebook system can have spam, which is probably something Facebook doesn't want.
- jhaile 14y agoArgh - are there any Facebook users who aren't annoyed by this change? Come on Facebook - admit you were wrong already.
- DanielBMarkham 14y agoI am reminded of an old Dilbert cartoon where they bring in a usability expert to help them write an app. After suggesting that the computer shock the user when they do the wrong thing, he quips, "I found this job to be a lot easier once I realized I hated people" Seriously, Facebook. Do one thing and do it well. Enough of this conquer-the-universe bullshit. I'm already at the point where I want to jump ship; I just can't figure out how to do it without losing contact with my friends. It's like you're using our own friends against us. Pretty slimy. My reaction to Facebook trying to take control of my email was that Facebook can go jump in a lake (My language was actually much worse than that.) I'm already primed to leave. I'm just waiting on the right opportunity to come along.
- alttab 14y agoClicking the little gray up arrow does not signify enough how much I agree with this sentiment.
- jps359 14y agoWell said. Talk about a lack of respect for the customer.
- scribblemacher 14y agoTo be fair, users aren't Facebook's customers.
- jps359 14y agoYou're right. I meant users. Thanks!
- spaghetti 14y agoJumping ship was easy for me. I catch-up with my local friends in person at a local bar or cafe. I catch-up with my remote friends by traveling to their city and going to a bar or cafe there. Or they come visit me. It's infinity more satisfying and relaxing that consuming status updates containing skewed and filtered representations of someone's life.
- nicholassmith 14y agoNothing is a cheaper move from a company than blaming the user for not getting the questionable decision. Take some responsibility for your decisions both positive and negative.
- rhizome 14y agoThey're just buying time, PR-wise, until they come up with a good explanation, which they don't have yet. There will be meta-controversy over blaming the users, after which FB will come out with new and improved interface signalling, documentation, and a non-apology.
- Xcelerate 14y agoI think Facebook is a great company, but their message system needs a bit of work. Last year I was at their HQ and one of the engineers was working with someone I knew on some code. The engineer said "send me a message on Facebook". So the guy sends it, and then the FB engineer said "I don't see it -- are you sure you sent it?" It took a few minutes before we all realized it had gone into the "other" section of the messages on Facebook. Not only that, but there were about 70 unread messages in there. We all laughed over the fact that even someone who writes a lot of the FB codebase didn't know those messages were there.
- Splines 14y agoFacebook needs to dogfood their own stuff. I remember reading about how they use IRC internally. Very cool, but it makes you wonder why they don't use facebook messages for everything.
- MartinCron 14y agoIt seems that Facebook and IRC seem to be well suited for very different kinds of communications. There's no reason that you can't use both.
- anonymoushn 14y agoFacebook messaging has group conversations that can mostly be used like IRC channels. I expect the primary reason that IRC is used is that Facebook's IM service was completely unable to reliably deliver messages for most of 2011.
- jmathai 14y agoYahoo didn't even use Yahoo! Mail which is much much much better than Facebook Messages. It was mainly because a lot of people were comfortable with Exchange and the Calendar integration. They tried Zimbra without success. At least they use Yahoo! Messenger internally.
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- sathyabhat 14y agoWow, I didn't even know that there was an "other" folder there.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoFacebook seems to be losing sight of what people want to use them for: snooping on their friends. ;) I wonder what the MVP of a Facebook de-throner would be. Google+ showed pretty well it wasn't about fighting them head-on. Instagram was making pretty good progress in an oblique fashion. What other directions could you come at this problem from?
- WiseWeasel 14y agoWell, LinkedIn already has the professional identity market locked down, so an entrant would probably want to focus on personal/private identity. One approach would be something targeted at dating and meeting people who share your preferred activities, while letting you manage how much of your real identity you want to reveal. Think Second Life meets FourSquare, with avatars, pseudonyms and various exaggerated expressions of individuality. Another approach would be something for sharing information privately with a group of existing friends, building group identity. Think private clubhouse.
- spaghetti 14y agoIMO the competing MVP is Twitter stripped down as much as possible. When I consume my Twitter feed about 50% of all Tweets have a photos or video. So the consumption process is scroll, read just a bit, watch or view something and repeat. For me that pattern is a pleasant experience. Stuff can be removed. The MySpace like backgrounds to start. Thinking big: remove or tone down mentions and hash tags since IMO they're visually distracting. Point is to make a list-based product where people consume photos and videos from a lightly filtered group of peers as easily as possible.
- Evbn 14y agoUsers blame confusion on Facebook email problem. What was the point of that response? Yeah, people get confused when you systems behave in unexpected unwanted ways. Especially the billion average humans in your user base.
- rlu 14y agoI think that a big part of this problem is that Apple played along. If I am understanding this correctly, the bigger issue here is that people's phonebooks are getting updated without consent (as opposed to the bigger issue being a different email being displayed on fb.com) and that this was only possible with Apple's involvement? Correct me if I'm wrong please. I think it's also worth noting that I have had no issues on Windows Phone. I don't remember how contacts work on Android (never owned an iPhone) but on Windows Phone, it displays ALL of their emails. So the UI would look something like this: John Smith -Call John -Text John -Email John (john@gmail.com) -Email John (john@college.edu) -Email John (john@facebook.com) So while it's true that if I only have a contact's details through Facebook Connect that I will only have their Faceobook email, is that really so common? Most people (even from Work - indeed ESPECIALLY from work) that I email from my phone I have as a PHONE contact. Even if I have the phone's contact linked with the FB contact, it will display both emails. And if I'm emailing someone from work and I don't have them on my phone then I usually look them up through Exchange rather than Facebook... Just my $0.02. Not trying to say that this is not an issue, just trying to show how: 1. Apple seems largely to blame? (correct me if I'm wrong) 2. The way UI works on my phone makes this mostly a non-issue and I'm curious as to how other phones handle "multiple emails per contacts". I'd imagine it's rather similar.
- sp332 14y agoFacebook actually syncs phone numbers, email addresses etc. to your iPhone. So if a user's email gets hidden, it looks like they've deleted that email from their profile, so the FB app would delete it from your address book assuming that it's no longer up-to-date.
- cbr 14y ago> the bigger issue here is that people's phonebooks are getting updated without consent Do you want to get a notification every time someone updates their email? Or do you want the emails your phone knows for people to just automatically stay up to date on their own?
- aniro 14y ago"Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer, you're not – you're the product," Schneier said. "Its customers are the advertisers." <http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continuity/news/1290603/facebook-is-deliberately-killing-privacy-says-schneier.thtml> http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-continu...;
- cjdavis 14y agoI've never heard of the 'other' folder before. So I go look for it and find a message from an old college friend getting back in touch. From 10 months ago. Thanks FB.
- agscala 14y agoWow, I just checked mine and I also had messages that I completely missed from people that I would have like to have been notified about. Just peachy.
- speleding 14y agoSame here. We are supposed to be the tech savvy crowd, so I dare say that if that happens to us you can safely say there is a big usability problem there. Just a little notification along the lines of "You have x unread messages in your 'other' folder", perhaps only once a week, would have gone a long way in solving this.
- cbr 14y agoMine had someone trying to hire my band. From February. Argh.
- alan_cx 14y agoAt what point can one consider Facebook to be malware?
- parfe 14y agoThe minute you delete your account. Until then you're just complaining about a product you refuse to stop using.
- horsehead 14y agoLol. It's always a smart move to call your users dumb when they don't appreciate a move your company has made. What is this, strike 17 against them?
- conipto 14y agoI can almost picture how this started. Zuck: "I'm tired of having to leave facebook to read my emails. Make them show up in my message feed. In fact, do that for everyone. I don't care how, just take their username and add facebook.com to the end."
- pixelcort 14y agoDid Facbook just add email addresses to people's address books, or did they also delete other email addresses from address books as well? I'm wondering if data loss from the perspective of lost contact info occurred here or not.
- conradfr 14y agoSo I went to see if I had an "Other" folder, and yes, filed with brands spam and ... "important" messages from real people, some from more than a year ago. Baffled, I never noticed its existence ! This and the fact that my FB homepage (stream ?) is somehow useless nowadays, I don't see a great future with Facebook.
- tallpapab 14y agoFor my 86 year old mother Facebook has been a boon and a great confusion. She keeps asking me about how people send her messages. There's email. There's Facebook Messages. There's her Facebook "wall". Then other people's statuses show up on her news feed or whatever you call her "home" page. She thinks those are also messages sent to her. It's a bit much. We think we have this straight because we work with all these things. But, Great Grunt, it can be hard for the uninitiated to figure out. Thankfully, no one has talked her into having a Twitter account or a smart phone with SMS and a few dozen social apps.
- wahsd 14y agoI hope some of the open source projects will be successful at building a self-owned social network. In all reality, you don't need massive server farms for facebook, what you do need them for is to crunch your specific profile and determine how best you can be cultivated for the most juicy marketing fruit. The relationship between user and facebook is about as real as the love of a slave driver for his slaves.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoI was going to shrug at this until I looked and saw messages from individuals personally reaching out to me including from a startup incubator. That was a slap in the face. Thanks for absolutely nothing Facebook.
- FuzzyDunlop 14y agoThe worst thing about Facebook is that you probably have contacts that don't appreciate the severity of a lot of Facebook's moves. So you keep the account because the communication is nicely convenient. Thus you continue to use it, given several alternatives, as the best of a bad bunch (because no-one uses the others). This never bodes well.
- f0untain 14y agoI don't see why Email can't replace Facebook, with some kind of social-aware email client.
- j_s 14y agoNot anymore. Facebook's e-mail debacle: One 'bug' fix, but rollback impossible http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4192133 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4192133
- richardw 14y agoIs there a way to remove any mail aspect of FB? I looked at this "Other" folder today for the first time, and the only two mails in there were replies to spam messages I'm supposed to have sent. I see zero benefit in having a Facebook email address. I want to give it back.
- zeruch 14y agoThe user "confusion" was caused by Facebook's actions, and the blowback is the only non-confused element; people don't like having things like that altered out from under them. It makes them "confused, or angry or litigious.