On: Facebook forces all users over to Facebook.com e-m...

[cfqycwz]

This morning my mother was complaining that many of the email addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones. It would seem the Facebook app had been populating her address book with emails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contacts over to this convenient new system. That seems like a much greater controversy to me than Facebook hiding people's email addresses.

[zhoutong → cfqycwz]

Yes, and how about iMessage and FaceTime that require email addresses in contacts to work? And also the 3rd party sites that rely on Facebook OAuth API to identify users based on emails (they could use uids, but I'm sure some are still using email).

[kennywinker → zhoutong]

Conspiracy theorist in me wonders if this move might have anything to do with the new facebook integration in iOS... millions of iPhones are about to start automatically pulling contact info from facebook, wouldn't it be nice if all those people started using their @facebook.com email address?

[nickheer → kennywinker]

Since this change, I haven't seen any difference in my contacts. It looks like it's still pulling all available email addresses, not just facebook.com ones.

[kennywinker → nickheer]

I assume you're running iOS 6, yes?

[nickheer → kennywinker]

Yes indeed.

[zhoutong → nickheer]

I'm afraid the details of the iOS 6 features other than what's announced in WWDC are still under NDA (which you signed when you gain access to the developer beta). So perhaps you want to remove that comment.

[danieldk → zhoutong]

This much is completely public:

http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/#facebook

(Click the "Contacts and calendars", and see that contacts can have multiple addresses, even with Facebook sync.)

[josteink → zhoutong]

Why do you care about that? Why does it matter to you that someone is discussing something Apple NDAed?

Do you care at all if it something Androidish? Something from MS? From anyone except Apple? If no, then shut your hypocritical mouth.

[slig → zhoutong]

This completely blows away the "let's the users sign up using facebook, we store their email and if we ever decide to ditch the FB login, we can always email them a password reset"

[starship → slig]

I'd like to second the request that someone test this who is in a place where they can easily do so. Thanks in advance.

[spydertennis → slig]

I think for now the api is still returning their correct email address.

[omarchowdhury → spydertennis]

Have you tested it? Is this going to stay that way or will API usage move to returning only @facebook.com as well?

[jaredsohn → omarchowdhury]

I'm a different person and I haven't tested it, but I would think it would ignore the new "show on timeline" field when retrieving via the API which would in effect return whatever e-mail addresses it used to return in addition to (assuming people don't change their settings) the new @facebook.com address.

It would be great if someone would check this, though.

[spydertennis → omarchowdhury]

Yes I just tested it.

[omarchowdhury → spydertennis]

And they are still returning non-Facebook addresses through the API?

That's surprising.

[sandGorgon → cfqycwz]

Facebook's android app is the most laggy, power hungry app I have. I use alternate apps to access Facebook. This is just one more reason to do so.

[robmburke → cfqycwz]

Well, that email issue on the phones seems to be a design issue with the OS, and not Facebook's overall fault.

On my Windows phone, if I have a Windows Live contact (the base contact saving system) with an email, and then port in Facebook contacts that match, it merges the accounts into one "profile" and it doesn't overwrite emails; it saves both emails and tells me where each one came from. Maybe if Android had a better system, this wouldn't have happened?

It's not Facebook's job to take something like that into account.