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The real anti-Facebook is good old email

wired.com

31–40 of 165 posts

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#32
Maybe what's needed is something that _looks_ superficially like a social media site, but under the hood is just an email system, using the tried-and-true email protocols, maybe with white-lists enabled. Basically, you're not "friending" someone...you're adding him to your white list.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#33

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

Point 1 is true for me as well. But I take a different approach in doing Point 2.

Since everyone has a gmail account (at least my target audience) and hardly have any activity on G+, I created a G+ community with just the right people and post updates there. These updates automatically send notifications via email to the community members.

The way content is organized and presented in a community is much better than email IMO. Of course everything can be translated to email - comments can be reply with text and likes/+1s can be reply with +1 - but looking back, it is a much better user experience to do this in a community/group rather than email.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#34

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

But getting someone's Facebook is less socially awkward than their email address. You can also remember them easier and communicate with them faster.

Most of the people I met this summer didn't have an American phone number so Facebook (or Whatsapp) was the only way to communicate with them.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#35
post #18

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

I'm glad you got good response. I suspect for most people, including me, the treatment would be the same as any other newsletter.

But would you argue that this is a flaw in the model of mail or in the perception and attitude towards emails and newsletters? If it's the latter, well, that's up to each themselves, and would deem mails and newsletters a still-viable way of notifying reliably about updates. While, if there are actual, inherent flaws in the idea of aggregated mails that make you and others dismiss them, another approach might in fact be better. N.B.: There at least seems to be a curious niche where even daily newsletters like thelistserve.com or nowiknow.com have their little space, for whatever that's worth.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#36
post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#37

I moved out of state a couple of years ago, and when I stopped using Facebook, I realized: 1: Facebook never was a good way of keeping in touch with friends and family back home for a number of reasons 2: I needed to be doing a better job of keeping in touch with friends and family back home My solution was to set up a newsletter. The idea is every 3-4 months I send out a mass email to friends and family describing w…

I think email works better because people perceive it as a more direct message just to them. If say, you send an email and bcc people on it, they feel like they were sent a direct one-on-one personal message (even if they objectively know it is a newsletter). Status updates on Twitter, Facebook, etc, when it was obvious that they are for multiple people not just a one-to-one message don't produce the same effect. People don't feel like they have to respond because someone else can respond instead.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#38
post #28

Facebook is flexible enough to provide this. You can post updates visible only to a group of people. Problem with Facebook is how people use it. Users tend to have > 500 friends on an average including ones to whom you have never spoken or never want to speak. This would make your timeline pretty irrelevant and uninteresting to you. Why would I care if a colleague in your first job (10 yr ago) went on a trip with his…

I didn't know that Facebook can send status updates via email to people who are not on Facebook.

I didn't know email could send updates to people whose address I don't know. Derp derp derp.

Re: The real anti-Facebook is good old email

#39
post #29
post #10

This is a great advert for TinyLetter, would love to know if they approached Wired to get this published and how that process went down.

That's got to be a "sponsored story". At the bottom of the page, there are links to more "Sponsored Stories - Powered by Outbrain". What is happening, and happened years ago, is that many people stopped using Facebook messaging and went back to email. It's easier to get messages via email on smartphones than to run Facebook's app.

These are two separate concepts. The sponsored stories by outbrain are just your regular old "lose 100 pounds per second" blogspam.

There is another, more benign phenomenon, where a company's PR department writes an article about the company, sends it off to a reporter, and says "Hey, we think you might be interested in publishing this (plus, we already did all the writing for you)" and then the newspaper edits it and publishes it as a regular article.

They see it as a sort of win-win situation. Reporters get an article to publish without any work, and companies get free / cheap PR.

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