12 ms·

Facebook quietly ends email address system

128 points by MaysonL 13y ago

lugg 13y ago
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.
- chch 13y ago
  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?
  - Pelerin 13y ago
    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.
    - chch 13y ago
      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. :)
      - frou_dh 13y ago
        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.
- gaius 13y ago
  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.
  - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
    > this problem simply went away Yeah, cause everyone has Gmail.
    - vidarh 13y ago
      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. "Everyone" in the tech world has Gmail.
      - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
        Yeah, but webmail sort of fixed the disappearing email address problem. That's what I meant.
  - lugg 13y ago
    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.
- concerned_user 13y ago
  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.
chinpokomon 13y ago
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.
techdfuture 13y ago
A very rare used featured in facebook... May be whatsup might take that spot, facebook should be looking to launch some service similar to whatsup instead of email service.
frik 13y ago
I want to see the real email addresses of my friends (again).
- pasbesoin 13y ago
  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.
  - Ntrails 13y ago
    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...
- richardw 13y ago
  That email switcheroo was the day FB was removed from my phone. Now it's back again, in Whatsapp clothes.
teddyh 13y ago
I would think that this is their attempt to kill the very idea of e-mail. In their world, everybody has Facebook, period.
- nick2 13y ago
  You still need an email to sign up for facebook.
  - qq66 13y ago
    No, you can sign up for Facebook with just a phone number. It only presents this option to you when you access the signup page from a phone, though.
- yeukhon 13y ago
  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. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addresses-_n_783697.html#s182605title=Email_SetUp http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addr...) He hasn't given up his dream of becoming the leader in mobile, seamless messaging/communication.
  - denibertovic 13y ago
    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.
    - fredsted 13y ago
      Well, why not? Just put your phone in your pocket when you want to stop replying immediately!
swang 13y ago
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.
- concerned_user 13y ago
  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.
EdwardDiego 13y ago
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.
finalight 13y ago
i don't even know there's facebook email address given to us
- yardie 13y ago
  It used to be prominently featured in your profile page. I've never used mine since I have so many better, older options.
enscr 13y ago
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.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  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.
  - amirmc 13y ago
    Or they'll buy whoever makes it to, say, 500M+ monthly active users of some other, new, email service. Probably for tens of billions.
- Sharlin 13y ago
  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...
  - k-mcgrady 13y ago
    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.
    - bdcravens 13y ago
      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")
DrewRWx 13y ago
That actually came in handy the odd times when I had to input an email address for someone that mainly used FB.
omh 13y ago
That's a shame. 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?
- dasil003 13y ago
  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).
  - omh 13y ago
    Ah, thanks. Missed that. So it doesn't look like there will be a way of getting an email in to their Facebook inbox. Unfortunately my grandmother never quite figured out email but she's very comfortable with Facebook.
  - concerned_user 13y ago
    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.
Nux 13y ago
Trusting Facebook with anything is a bad idea. They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders. People come and go, the email system stays, eventually outliving Facebook, too. :) I wouldn't be surprised if they'll make a U-turn and offer email again in the future.
- superuser2 13y ago
  >They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders. This is true of every for-profit enterprise. Why direct it against Facebook in particular?
  - Silhouette 13y ago
    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.
    - superuser2 13y ago
      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.
      - michas 13y ago
        You are terribly wrong with that. The whole purpose of existence of each and every private company is to do good for it's clients/users, because that's the only legal way to make money. If you want people to give you money for something that is not good for them that's called extortion.
ulfw 13y ago
Well that was one huge success again.
skrebbel 13y ago
I love the photo subtitle: > Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of email in 2010.
- lovamova 13y ago
  This guy invented email, right?
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    Yes, and when people say "my Internet", what they're really referring to is not a home Internet connection but their own personal Internet.
- xbadxapple 13y ago
  Yeah, screw those decades before, 2010 is where it's at!
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
josefresco 13y ago
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.
- jackcarter 13y ago
  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.
  - bluepnume 13y ago
    Someone found my wallet too and located me on linkedin. Come to think of it, it's the most useful linkedin has ever been for me.
matthewmayer 13y ago
So, after the change, anyone who knows my public Facebook username can now directly send me email? I wonder if we'll be able to turn that off...
- theGimp 13y ago
  Facebook says that will be an option.
nicholassmith 13y ago
Who would have thought customers would want yet another email service that had no real benefits over their existing email service? It always seemed like a baffling idea to try and run out in the world, especially as to get a Facebook account you need an email address.
the_watcher 13y ago
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.
- 11001 13y ago
  @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.
  - cbhl 13y ago
    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.
the_watcher 13y ago
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.
- awakeasleep 13y ago
  I'd love to hear the full arguments behind this. 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?
- loceng 13y ago
  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.
- mandeepj 13y ago
  Email could be fundamentally broken when you want to talk casually but during business communication it is great. In the email - you list down all the participants, subject and body which really helps in getting your message across
mathouc 13y ago
Oh, just wrote an article about the lessons we learned from that: http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping-its-e-mail-service/ http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping-its-...

128 points by MaysonL 13y ago

lugg 13y ago

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.

chch 13y ago
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?
- Pelerin 13y ago
  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.
  - chch 13y ago
    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. :)
    - frou_dh 13y ago
      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.
gaius 13y ago
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.
- mattgreenrocks 13y ago
  > this problem simply went away Yeah, cause everyone has Gmail.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    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. "Everyone" in the tech world has Gmail.
    - mattgreenrocks 13y ago
      Yeah, but webmail sort of fixed the disappearing email address problem. That's what I meant.
- lugg 13y ago
  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.
concerned_user 13y ago
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.

chinpokomon 13y ago

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.

techdfuture 13y ago

A very rare used featured in facebook... May be whatsup might take that spot, facebook should be looking to launch some service similar to whatsup instead of email service.

frik 13y ago

I want to see the real email addresses of my friends (again).

pasbesoin 13y ago
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.
- Ntrails 13y ago
  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...
richardw 13y ago
That email switcheroo was the day FB was removed from my phone. Now it's back again, in Whatsapp clothes.

teddyh 13y ago

I would think that this is their attempt to kill the very idea of e-mail. In their world, everybody has Facebook, period.

nick2 13y ago
You still need an email to sign up for facebook.
- qq66 13y ago
  No, you can sign up for Facebook with just a phone number. It only presents this option to you when you access the signup page from a phone, though.
yeukhon 13y ago
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. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addresses-_n_783697.html#s182605title=Email_SetUp http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/15/facebook-email-addr...) He hasn't given up his dream of becoming the leader in mobile, seamless messaging/communication.
- denibertovic 13y ago
  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.
  - fredsted 13y ago
    Well, why not? Just put your phone in your pocket when you want to stop replying immediately!

swang 13y ago

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.

concerned_user 13y ago
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.

EdwardDiego 13y ago

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.

finalight 13y ago

i don't even know there's facebook email address given to us

yardie 13y ago
It used to be prominently featured in your profile page. I've never used mine since I have so many better, older options.

enscr 13y ago

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.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
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.
- amirmc 13y ago
  Or they'll buy whoever makes it to, say, 500M+ monthly active users of some other, new, email service. Probably for tens of billions.
Sharlin 13y ago
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...
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  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.
  - bdcravens 13y ago
    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")

DrewRWx 13y ago

That actually came in handy the odd times when I had to input an email address for someone that mainly used FB.

omh 13y ago

That's a shame. 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?

dasil003 13y ago
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).
- omh 13y ago
  Ah, thanks. Missed that. So it doesn't look like there will be a way of getting an email in to their Facebook inbox. Unfortunately my grandmother never quite figured out email but she's very comfortable with Facebook.
- concerned_user 13y ago
  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.

Nux 13y ago

Trusting Facebook with anything is a bad idea. They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders. People come and go, the email system stays, eventually outliving Facebook, too. :) I wouldn't be surprised if they'll make a U-turn and offer email again in the future.

superuser2 13y ago
>They have no obligation towards anyone to do anything, except for their shareholders. This is true of every for-profit enterprise. Why direct it against Facebook in particular?
- Silhouette 13y ago
  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.
  - superuser2 13y ago
    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.
    - michas 13y ago
      You are terribly wrong with that. The whole purpose of existence of each and every private company is to do good for it's clients/users, because that's the only legal way to make money. If you want people to give you money for something that is not good for them that's called extortion.

ulfw 13y ago

Well that was one huge success again.

skrebbel 13y ago

I love the photo subtitle: > Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the launch of email in 2010.

lovamova 13y ago
This guy invented email, right?
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  Yes, and when people say "my Internet", what they're really referring to is not a home Internet connection but their own personal Internet.
xbadxapple 13y ago
Yeah, screw those decades before, 2010 is where it's at!

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

josefresco 13y ago

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.

jackcarter 13y ago
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.
- bluepnume 13y ago
  Someone found my wallet too and located me on linkedin. Come to think of it, it's the most useful linkedin has ever been for me.

matthewmayer 13y ago

So, after the change, anyone who knows my public Facebook username can now directly send me email? I wonder if we'll be able to turn that off...

theGimp 13y ago
Facebook says that will be an option.

nicholassmith 13y ago

Who would have thought customers would want yet another email service that had no real benefits over their existing email service? It always seemed like a baffling idea to try and run out in the world, especially as to get a Facebook account you need an email address.

the_watcher 13y ago

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.

11001 13y ago
@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.
- cbhl 13y ago
  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.

the_watcher 13y ago

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.

awakeasleep 13y ago
I'd love to hear the full arguments behind this. 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?
loceng 13y ago
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.
mandeepj 13y ago
Email could be fundamentally broken when you want to talk casually but during business communication it is great. In the email - you list down all the participants, subject and body which really helps in getting your message across

mathouc 13y ago

Oh, just wrote an article about the lessons we learned from that: http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping-its-e-mail-service/ http://blog.frontapp.com/lessons-from-facebook-stopping-its-...