
Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion" - tim_sw
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook-blames-email-problems-on-user-confusion.php
======
DanielBMarkham
I 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.

~~~
anon808
"I just can't figure out how to do it without losing contact with my friends."

easy . . . call them, visit them, email them, write letters to them. you don't
need an application to managed personal relationships.

~~~
k-mcgrady
>> "you don't need an application to managed personal relationships"

You do when you're keeping in touch with friends you've made throughout your
life and not just your current ones. That's the thing Facebook makes easy.

Also email and writing letters don't really work. If I sent a letter to a
friend I seriously doubt they would bother responding, and most people I know
personally don't use email. They use Facebook. That's the big problem -
Facebook has replaced email for a lot of people making it one of the only ways
(besides visiting/calling) to contact them.

~~~
gnaritas
> You do when you're keeping in touch with friends you've made throughout your
> life and not just your current ones.

Your friends _are_ the current ones. Those other people aren't friends
anymore, they're acquaintances, people you used to know but don't see anymore.
Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on
a regular basis. If your only contact with a person is through facebook, they
aren't your friends.

~~~
joeblubaugh
You know what? You don't get to decide who people's friends are. 30 years ago
people had all kinds of friends they only got to communicate with on the phone
and through letters. Non-face-to-face friendships (and romantic relationships)
have existed since we had semi-reliable postal services. People happen to find
things like Twitter & Facebook really helpful in this regard.

~~~
gnaritas
I'm not telling anyone who their friends are, I'm telling you you're using the
English language sloppily if everyone in your Facebook you really consider a
"friend". You've devalued the word to nearly meaninglessness. Everyone you've
ever met is not your friend. Everyone you've had a friendly conversation with
and looked up on Facebook is not your friend.

~~~
abduhl
This is a ridiculous argument. There are plenty of people I see every day that
I would consider, at best, an acquaintance. There is also a very small group
of people that I see maybe once or twice a year that I would consider friends.

Your definition of friendship is outrageously shallow and is contrary to any
other definition I have heard.

~~~
greedo
Agree. My best friend is moving to another state, 16 hours away. I skypechat
with him on a daily basis, and he knows me like a brother. I haven't "seen"
him in over two years, and when I joked that he was going to leave town
without saying goodbye, he said "what will be different?"

He was right, nothing is different. It's like friends back in the 1800s
exchanging letters. Doesn't mean that our friendship is less because we don't
go out on Fridays and pound down a few pints.

In contrast, the people I work with, I spend far more time with, and interact
directly with more frequently than my friend. Yet I wouldn't consider any of
them friends.

~~~
Karunamon
Thank you. I for one am tired of seeing the "People you only interact with
online are not friends" canard. Relationships don't work that way.

------
Xcelerate
I 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
Facebook 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.

~~~
jmathai
Yahoo 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.

~~~
damncabbage
During my time there a lot of the Engineers used Google Search, and a local
Jabber install for IM because Y! Messenger was that ad-filled and painful to
use.

(Maybe my experience was limited to a pocket within Yahoo!)

~~~
jmathai
Yes, by Yahoo! Messenger I just meant the protocol and servers. I used Adium,
personally.

I also used Google Search though I would try Yahoo! search every couple
months. I don't believe the search engine is _that_ much worse but I'd become
accustomed to searching Google and understanding the results.

------
imgabe
> “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
Facebook 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
Most 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?

~~~
swang
To 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.

------
tadfisher
Tip: If your new, undocumented system confuses the majority of your users,
then it's not a problem with your users!

------
dkokelley
At 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
Absolutely. Users should demand their money back, too.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I realise you're being sarcastic, but I wish I could get my _time_ back from
Facebook.

------
51Cards
Ok, 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)

------
cjdavis
I'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
Wow, 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.

------
rlu
I 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
Facebook 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.

------
SoftwareMaven
Facebook 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?

~~~
spaghetti
IMO 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.

------
vegashacker
The 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
So? The outcome is the same - users are confused due to the poor integration
of Facebook email!

~~~
alttab
And they wonder why no one wanted to use it in 2010.

------
tallpapab
For 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.

------
conradfr
So 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.

------
aniro
"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-
continu...](http://www.information-age.com/channels/security-and-
continuity/news/1290603/facebook-is-deliberately-killing-privacy-says-
schneier.thtml>);

------
nicholassmith
Nothing 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
They'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.

------
tehayj
They were probably not holding it right!

------
Bobby_Tables
If every user makes the same error, it isn't user error...

~~~
tomrod
This is almost the contrapositive to "it's not a bug, it's a feature!"

------
jhaile
Argh - are there any Facebook users who aren't annoyed by this change? Come on
Facebook - admit you were wrong already.

------
conipto
I 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
Did 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.

------
sathyabhat
Wow, I didn't even know that there was an "other" folder there.

------
wahsd
I 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.

------
alan_cx
At what point can one consider Facebook to be malware?

~~~
parfe
The minute you delete your account.

Until then you're just complaining about a product you refuse to stop using.

------
FuzzyDunlop
The 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.

------
richardw
Is 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
The 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.

------
j_s
Not anymore.

Facebook's e-mail debacle: One 'bug' fix, but rollback impossible

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4192133>

------
drivebyacct2
I 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.

------
aginn
Skynet is here

