[telecom] Facebook's Email Switch Causing More Problems

Facebook's Email Switch Causing More Problems

Karsten Strauss

6/30/2012

Remember when it was reported that Facebook was changing users' default email addresses to Facebook email addresses? Well, [a] journalist [named] Violet Blue wrote today that there's feedback from around the web that the change may have negative side effects, namely the alteration of email addresses on personal devices. Possibly as a result, emails are being redirected or even lost.

The social networking site had previously offered users the option of signing on to have a Facebook email address but recently decided to simply automatically sign up all of its users for the service.

Ms. Blue also reported that user contact info would be altered as part of Apple's new iOS 6 Facebook integration. "Facebook for iOS will change address books without any warning," according to the piece.

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***** Moderator's Note *****

Jill Duffy's comments for PC Magazine (third link, above) make me want to shout "FINALLY"! It seems that I'm not the only person who is questioning the (dubious) value of FaceTube.

Bill Horne Moderator

As always, it's one person's opinion of what is or what is not valuable to an individual. If Facebook was deemed to be not worth much they wouldn't have over a half-billion subscribers. If you've been paying any attention to what's been going on in the world you'd see that Facebook (and Twitter) have helped in many people's struggles dealing with repressive governments among other things. Just because one person doesn't think that something is useful doesn't mean someone else doesn't hold to that opinion. Something else to consider too is what generation you identify with. People over a certain age do things or think of things differently on a host of different things. Ob telecom: many young people don't use the phone much at all for voice calls any longer and use either text or some on line way to communicate. This may be a foreign concept to people of a different generation.

That's not to say that Facebook hasn't done some pretty boneheaded moves and all those moves seem to do is to rile up their subscribers. It seems as if Facebook is constantly looking for ways to annoy its users. :) Then again, it seems as if all companies do something similar. If something works they feel they have to mess with it and "make it better" even if "better" is sometimes worse than what they started with.