Now that many of my friends and business associates are now my friends on Facebook, I have noticed a reduction in the amount of email I get from them. This is absolutely brilliant as far as I’m concerned.
Spam is a massive problem with normal email. Facebook answers this problem by only allowing people who you have accepted as friends to send you messages. Of course, you can also receive messages from groups, but if you ever decide you don’t want to hear from them again you can simply leave group.
The other issue that alot of people have with email is the amount of chain messages and emails not related to work that get sent around during office hours. But now people can simply add the stuff that they think is funny to their Facebooks and allow their friends to look at it when they find it convenient or when they’re in the mood.
I look forward to one-day reducing my inbox quota to single digits, and officially declaring email bankruptcy!
I’m getting pretty pissed off with the amount of group spam I’m getting.
I like getting my mail in gmail though, it’s such a great interface. But, I would like to cut back on it
I wish everone would get onto delicious, that would make my life so much easier! it’s much better just adding a For:DaveDuarte than having to open my ridiculously slow Outlook, or go through the 10 click process to send any other kind of mail.\\
I don’t get spam… gmail rocks!
Yeah, I must admit that this is a bit of a fantasy post.
I also love gmail – the spam filter is terrific – but I’m getting alot of non-bot spam these days – real people who I don’t know asking for stuff for free etc.
Facebook cuts this out.
But, if you have to search for some message that was posted, can you easily get it? If you want to take all these messages and archive it, can you do it? Can you start a thread of conversation, and include other people? Can you send messages to your friends on MySpace?
I have had meaningful conversations on Facebook, but all those data are in the hands of facebook. I like my communication centralized, archived and more importantly, be my property
I don’t like how Facebook is subtly becoming an island of data, locking us in.
Some more food for thought:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000898.html
Danie, while I agree with you entirely, I do think that this app-killer functionality will eventually be built into Facebook. Or the next big thing after it
Dave, Facebook allows anybody to send anybody a message – there’s no restriction that you have to add them as a friend, or be in a network or group with them or anything.
The only way Facebook stops people sending spam messages is requiring them to signup to Facebook first – you can’t just blast a thousand messages into the ether, you have to be a Facebook member and send to specific people.
Actually, now I think about it, even the “send to specific people” thing isn’t a problem – everybody has a unique ID number on facebook, so you can just send a message to 500000, 500001, 500002 and so on.
[time passes]
Okay, now that I’ve tried, it’s quite hard to script facebook automated actions – there’s a *lot* of javascript involved, so you need an engine which understands javascript as well as plain HTML, and this should make it hard enough to blast a thousand facebook actions at once that it shouldn’t be a problem.
The point here, though, is that facebook is difficult enough to use (you need to click through all the links and have a big slow browser that can handle all the javascript) that it’s not a viable spam platform yet. That’s not really a point in facebook’s favour, though.
Thanks Jonathan. Good point! Well, I guess I should expand on this topic in a follow-up post… I guess what I was trying to convey is that if not Facebook, then IM, Twitter, Pownce, Skype, and a whole lotta other apps are eating away at email’s supremacy.
Of course, all of these are susceptble to spammers, but perhaps the fragmentation will make their taks a little more challenging (we hope!)
Seems like someone at facebook reads your blog
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=5344177130