This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet. I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people.
It seems Tim Berners Lee's worry about the effect of Facebook towards less open Internet is getting more true than ever. Are there significant actions we can do about this?
Large Internet email providers (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail) should come up with something similar like address auto-fill on third-party sites (with appropriate security & privacy implementation). They might even want to team up to counter Facebook's rise--after all, Facebook is now one of their largest competitors on the Net. (I am aware that Microsoft is an investor and partner of Facebook; so Hotmail might be less likely to come on board.)
I believe the advantage of not having to remember email addresses is very useful to many people.
Who remembers email address? You type in the first few letters of the person's name, and your email client should give you autocomplete, on both the email address and the real name.
Except not everyone is a practical hacker. I have a lot of older relatives who have email addresses like "_army_mom57_lol@hotmail.com" or other such addresses. "Do I type Terri? No she's got some silly email address, something about the army..."
Most mail clients let you associate a real name with an email address, so that's not really an issue. Thunderbird (and probably others) even capture incoming names/emails and let you use them.
I have yet to meet ONE person who outside of the office uses outlook/tb/anything who is also not a hacker. (iPhone/Android/etc does not count, and even on those they use the gmail app). Sure some use hotmail, some gmail, some migrating to gmail but overall gmail does a good job with this stuff.
The real advantage of facebook is that instead of YOU filling in personal info about your friends, your friends do that for you. And vuala, instant address book management.
For the last part I agree the with the pro you mentioned, but it is also a con, with following possible cases where it breaks down:
- they won't show all of their info to you
- you don't care about all of it, only a subset
- they did not update their info correctly
- not everyone uses Facebook to the same extent, if at all
Having a consolidated address-book you manage, regardless of what service you use to interact with each of your contacts. Besides I can normalize the data the way I want.
That said, it would be interesting to have Facebook and others as an available source (among many others) to an address-book. Of course I suppose Facebook won't ever expose it as an LDAP endpoint of sorts.
Exposing it via a standard method, like LDAP, would be awesome, and I agree entirely unlikely considering the (passive aggressive?) stance Facebook and Google are taking on exposing that information.
Exposing your address book via a method that allows you to consume it programatically and thereby make it more useful? We wouldn't want to enable competitors because we obviously can't continue to exist or be relevant using any method other than locking people in.
I think a social layer is inevitable, the way that people used to interact with websites purely through urls today is too impersonal. What Facebook is doing is creating a great abstraction layer to improve the UX of the web as a whole.
I think you're onto something and I think what we're seeing is the resurgence of portals on the web. Reddit and Hacker News are niche content portals. Facebook is in a position to be a mass market portal to the entire web.
Competition is a matter of time and people's purpose driven browsing will continue to push people to various sources.
I've thought for a long time that eventually there will be profile providers and network providers, to which you plug your profile information into with varying degrees of exposure.
This may evolve such that Facebook becomes more open as demand for openness increases, or there could be a Diaspora-like force that blows the closed-garden open, but like the online services of the 80s and 90s I think that openness will out. Facebook's challenge is to stay ahead of this curve such that their garden appears to be more open than it is in order to stem attrition, but there are still lots of people who aren't interested in likes or tweeting or any other form of information-disgorgement toward a private company. Couple this with possible (and possibly inevitable) privacy breaches and Facebook remains vulnerable. Think of where Google was five years ago and where they stand today, as a less-than-total (and possibly decreasing) presence.
There is an ebb-and-flow to these developments, and Facebook users constitute thin-clients in the continuing historical battle between centralization and nodal power.
Yes, have browsers improve the MailTo feature. For example FF has a list of passwords, why not an address book or build open access with the user's email provider? eg, a Gmail user clicking on it shows a list of contacts in email address book by Gmail.
> This will accelerate the pace that Facebook replaces email for some users and strengthen its position as an essential utility on the Internet.
Will it really though? My feeling (based completely on anecdotal evidence) has always been that pretty much NOBODY ever uses these social buttons (that button strip on every website with Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc.) on websites unrelated to social networking.
Is my feeling wrong or is there some reason to believe that users will change their behavior in the future?
Shameless plug: If you like this functionality and don't want to wait for sites to implement it, use http://www.yourpane.com, it's a free alternative I wrote that doesn't rely on a webmaster installing it and you can view all the submissions in one place.
Duplicate comment: Reposted so that context is maintained
Ok I tried the product and here are my suggestions:
1) Use Google Connect/Yahoo or something so that you can access my Contacts list
2) It is the same as opening a browser window with email app since the contacts are not there already or shown in a dropdown.
3)The problem is not that I have to move away from the page to share it. The pain comes in moving away and doing stuff. If I have to move away to find that one email id, it is of no use.
4) Who would save Contacts in a seperate list? No CSV Upload is not the solution.
1) That seems to be requested a lot, so I'll add it.
2) The contacts are there when you add them, so you just click them. Have you tried the "Contacts" page?
3) You don't have to move away, the bookmarklet appears in a lightbox. Are you sure you aren't just using the "Send" page?
4) This is true, but this is more targeted to a few of your friends rather than everyone, and adding everyone would clutter the list more than help, I think...
I've used yourpane and like it. But I think the killer feature of Facebook Send is the inbuilt contacts list with auto-suggest. If you could let users import their address books into yourpane, that would be great.
Yep, I should do this as everyone seems to request it. I just need to be careful to note that you shouldn't import everyone, as it will clutter things up. Right now the best part is that you only see the 10-20 people you send things to frequently so you can just click on them rather than type anything.
Ah, I wasn't sure they did this, I've never used Xobni. I think they just get them from your emails (it looks like they have access to them), but I'll look into it more as it could solve this problem, thank you.
I don't have any sort of access to the user's mail, I can use a small widget that imports contacts from your email provider but for anything more involved I'd basically have to write my own importer, which is a lot of work.
We've been developing a web app (http://tusulog.com) to address this "need" in addition to others. Our app allows your public timeline (like Twitter) and groups concept. You can have public, anon and private groups. Private groups are just like FB groups. Even if FB Groups seem to be more than sufficient, we think FB pages have become very cluttered. Furthermore, they couldn't have nailed it (I don't know why): 50m groups for 700m users is not much and humans communicate mostly by group/network basis. In other words, you don't speak to family the same you speak to school friends.
We haven't done any PR/promotion work and I want to ask your comments about how should we compete against the Goliaths?
This feature sounds great on paper. But it means adding yet another FB dependency (or third-party if you will) to my web page, and that means more stuff for users to download. It also clutters the UI and placing it on a page can sometimes be a mayor PITA, depending on the layout of your page, and the last thing I want is to redesign parts of my pages yet again because FB released a new button. You can always choose not to use it, but we all know how that is with search-driven traffic. Now days if you don't have FB's like button it's like putting "Disallow: *" in your robots.txt. And it will (probably) be the same with this "send" button.
I just wish they'd figured out a way to combine the two.
Well, it's still sending data through Facebook. If you want to send things, why not put a bookmarklet to your email account in the bookmark bar of your browser?
I think your main graphic doesn't explain at all your service. you should animate it (use flash) or use a javascript gallery so people know exactly what it is
or maybe the advantages are not clear at all. everyone can already share links through skype, msn or email or facebook so it's not clear why they'd need yourpane
I know the feeling of working so hard on a project and then apparently nobody notices. It doesn't mean your idea or vision sucks, starting a service takes determination. Applies to 99% of developers, and only 1% gets on the frontpage of HN, because they took a lot of time to craft simple and efficient copy and design, and also took a lot of time to think about the features
I agree with you on the graphic, it does need a bit more explanation.
The purpose of the service is to complement IM, for when you want to share things with people who aren't on IM right now or don't want to be bothered (or sharing with multiple people). You send a link to the people you want, they get to it on their own time.
A crucial feature that is sort-of missing is the ability to comment on links, because sending links is an inherently social act. I'll work on this more if people start using the service, but there are a few problems due to the way the service works.
Getting no love on HN does not mean you or the product is not good. Being sad and pouty about it might. Move on, make it so big and good that someone else posts it on HN the next time instead of you doing it.
It wasn't my intention to be pouty, I just remarked on what happened.
I'm in the process of growing it, and its users find it extremely useful so far, after they get past the "why can't I just email them?" stage and see that this is much faster.
If anything, Facebook's move provides me with a clear way to position the product, rather than have to say "it's a bit easier than email".
Sorry for being rude (if I was). I have that feeling too when I get no love for my ideas or comments or web projects. But I have learnt to put the narcissism behind me and take the bigger lesson. Which is: WHY did it happen? WHY did they not like it?
Also I will give it a shot and suggest if there is something that can be improved (at least from an experience perspective). You can of course take it or ignore it too.
Oh, no, they liked it very much (the comments where overwhelmingly positive, such as "this already changed the way I share things"), it just didn't get noticed/upvoted much.
Ok I tried the product and here are my suggestions:
1) Use Google Connect/Yahoo or something so that you can access my Contacts list
2) It is the same as opening a browser window with email app since the contacts are not there already or shown in a dropdown.
3)The problem is not that I have to move away from the page to share it. The pain comes in moving away and doing stuff. If I have to move away to find that one email id, it is of no use.
4) Who would save Contacts in a seperate list? No CSV Upload is not the solution.
It seems Tim Berners Lee's worry about the effect of Facebook towards less open Internet is getting more true than ever. Are there significant actions we can do about this?
Large Internet email providers (Google, Yahoo, Hotmail) should come up with something similar like address auto-fill on third-party sites (with appropriate security & privacy implementation). They might even want to team up to counter Facebook's rise--after all, Facebook is now one of their largest competitors on the Net. (I am aware that Microsoft is an investor and partner of Facebook; so Hotmail might be less likely to come on board.)