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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
