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Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

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Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#61

Post by ben1040 »

spaghetti wrote: post #17
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #13

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…

Jumping ship was easy for me. I catch-up with my local friends in person at a local bar or cafe. I catch-up with my remote friends by traveling to their city and going to a bar or cafe there. Or they come visit me. It's infinity more satisfying and relaxing that consuming status updates containing skewed and filtered representations of someone's life.

Same here. It occurred to me at some point that while I had a fairly large group of "friends" on Facebook, there were only 10-15 people that I really actually cared about.

And those are people that I communicate with on a regular basis outside of Facebook, either by hanging out with them in person, or phone/email for the ones who have moved away. So there's no love lost with them by ditching Facebook.

That leaves the group of people that I knew from college and high school, but had nothing else in common so we lost touch until Facebook came around. I graduated from college 5 years before joining Facebook, and looking back I don't feel like my life was any worse off in those intervening years because I didn't have those people on an e-friends list.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#62

Post by anonymoushn »

MartinCron wrote: post #58
Splines wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems that Facebook and IRC seem to be well suited for very different kinds of communications. There's no reason that you can't use both.

Facebook messaging has group conversations that can mostly be used like IRC channels. I expect the primary reason that IRC is used is that Facebook's IM service was completely unable to reliably deliver messages for most of 2011.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#63

Post by k-mcgrady »

gnaritas wrote: post #57
k-mcgrady wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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.…

> 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…

That's highly subjective. For example, if I moved abroad the people I hung out with regularly before would still be 'friends' to me. I would still care about what's happening in their lives and Facebook is a great way to continue that relationship. To me a friend is someone, not related, that I care about. Not someone that I hang out with regularly.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#64

Post by brownbat »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #27
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #13

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…

Facebook's apps will no longer be on any of my mobile devices. They've proven that I can't trust them without a browser sandbox between me and them.

I'd say 'me too,' but I can't actually delete their app from my Sprint Evo.

Well played, Facebook. Well played.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#65

Post by freehunter »

fallenhitokiri wrote: post #54
freehunter wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing email doesn't do well: the idea of "I have something to say, but passively". Maybe you want to announce a change in your life, or a party, or some thought that you had. It's far less annoying to put it on Facebook where your friends can digest it (or not) at their leisure, rather than in an email demanding to be read. "Hey, what's your new address?" "I emailed it to you, go search through your messages"…

The only problem I see with your email sentence is that some clients lack a decent search functionality. Some improvements and it would IMHO be as easy, if not easier, as opening Facebook, trying to find a contact and fight against the timeline to find the information you are looking for. I think the party part is a bit of personal choice. If I run a party I want to notify $foo people. And $foo is always a smaller nu…

This might be locale-specific, but there's a lot of times I'm notified of a party/get-together via a Facebook post saying "I'll be down at $taphouse tonight at 9, feel free to stop by!" That's a very passive invite, and Facebook (or Twitter or G+ et al) is perfect for that.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#66

Post by cheap »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #39
anon808 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

>> "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.…

Facebook gave you the problem that you didn't have before Facebook.

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#67

Post by DanBC »

seiji wrote: post #22
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #13

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…

Enough of this conquer-the-universe bullshit. Their end goal is to be the entire Internet in a curated show-you-only-what-you-agree-with-so-you-click-on-more-things model. They won't stop or slow down until something else makes them irrelevant.

That model didn't work for AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc etc. But they were all networks that provided access to the wider Internet.

It's really weird to see Facebook working the other way round - a tiny company growing huge and grabbing more and more of the wider Internet.

What next? Facebook Video? Facebook VOIP?

Re: Facebook Blames Email Problems On User "Confusion"

#70

Post by malandrew »

betterth wrote: post #50
anon808 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

If it was this simple than Facebook would never have caught on in the first place. The answer isn't "rollback" because clearly there is some value here. The answer is finding out how to maximize that value to our lives, not maximize the payout for investors.

The main thing Facebook provides that isn't addressable with the systems we'd be left with in a "rollback" is a universal way to stay linked to other people that provides both people with control over whether that link exists or not. Everything else is just features glommed on top of that basic feature.

AFAICT there are only two ways to provide that basic feature:

(!) A centralized service like Facebook that manages the identity network. Any centralized organization is most likely ultimately going to exploit the fact that they own the network for their own gain, financial or otherwise.

or

(2) A decentralized service based on the similar cryptographic math as bitcoin, where every user gets one token representing their identity, and some sort of way to propagate changes to their identity signed by that token to everyone they are connected to and this needs to be accomplished in such a way that you can always re-establish the links to your friends in the network to be able to sync data.

I can't even begin to imagine how you'd develop the latter into a form that would be usable and therefore adoptable by the average person.

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