Comments on: Why Facebook Will Have a Big 2009

By: c0wfunk

c0wfunk — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 02:24:58 +0000

and yet I can’t find a link to “post to facebook” on your articles!

By: Mike Borozdin

Mike Borozdin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:26:49 +0000

>Facebook is Email 2.0

It’s likely to happen for personal communication, but not for business communication.

Moreover there are many limitations of Facebook e-mail, you cannot attach a file, forward messages, add blind-cardbon copies and so on.

Besides to find out if you’ve got a new message you have to stay on Facebook or get an e-mail notification, but it’s much easier to send and receive e-mails rather than e-mail notifications from Facebook and then go to Facebook read and send…

By: mcdanielnc89

mcdanielnc89 — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:07:36 +0000

So wrong.. Facebok is no better than myspace.. U can add all the people u want on facebook just like myspace.. no better than any othe ersocial network.

By: Josh Catone

Josh Catone — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:52:48 +0000

@briank: Certainly, OpenID is working very well for a lot of people. But it’s a war for public perception right now and so the failures — even small ones — turn into big problems. People love to complain about the bad stuff more than talk about the triumphs, unfortunately (that goes for Facebook, as well — i.e., Beacon).

For early adopters, it’s easy for us to see why OpenID and the open stack makes a lot more sense. But Facebook has the clear path to victory among the mainstream right now. I hope that changes, personally, but their strategy is looking very impressive at the moment, imho.

@Darryl: I think that will change, actually. It’s something I’ve been saying for a couple of years and a lot of people disagree, but I think Facebook is in a good position to be the future of business networking, as well (i.e., compete with LinkedIn). It’s harder for anyone over 24 or 25 to see, I think (it’s hard for me to really see how it will replace email — and I am 25), but it’s already happening for such a large percentage of the younger audience that it is hard to ignore.

I think there’s a good chance that businesses will actually begin to accept Facebook and use it as a productivity tool (which I think it can be given proper privacy controls). Further, if Facebook Connect really does win out, it will become a lot harder to block it at work since so many sites will rely on it.

By: Phil Butler

Phil Butler — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:47:23 +0000

Opps. a hotkey away from comment disaster, sorry. Any way. the end result of Flock and OpenID was what you might call – “The POOF syndrome” in that I was connected on every level to Facebook, YouTube, Digg and etc rather instantly. POOF is good for me, especially as the security level goes up.

I think OpenID is going to win this little war.

Always,

Phil

By: Phil Butler

Phil Butler — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 13:44:34 +0000

I tend to agree with Brian, in that OpenID will get there. I recently talked with CEO of Flock Shawn Hardin right after the deal with MySpace. I had been a fan of Flock some time and on this event, had occasion to re-test their latest version. From a user standpoint (and simplistically) downloading Flock on my latest PC

By: Phil Butler

Phil Butler — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 10:19:50 +0000

Replacing email….hmmm. I guess that is conceivable. Heck anything is conceivable. On a personal level though, there is something more personal and innately close to me as a user about email. Perhaps there is some ethereal link between me (or anybody) between stuff that resides on the PC. This is a hard one to nail down. But, though we do not use the rich features of email so much, this is one aspect that Facebook or other remote sites do not allow us.

That being ..uh said or thought, if someone made an App for Facebook that possessed all the rich features and security of Thunderbird or Outlook etc….then yes Facebook would have something big…opps there’s a free idea.

Always,
Phil

P.S. I somehow thing that Faceboook might decline a little this year, maybe something a lot cooler will come out.

By: Darryl

Darryl — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:31:27 +0000

I agree that Facebook will replace a lot of things, but all of email? It will in the end still depend on what works for you, and how the world works. All these students now know Facebook, till they get to their first job, and find out that their clients aren’t on Facebook, and that their company has blocked the Facebook URL, because they see it as a waste of time.

By: briank

briank — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 07:45:18 +0000

“An anecdote: When Wetpaint dropped OpenID support…”

Correct, only an anecdote. Yes, OpenID has room to improve but it is an open standard with the support of Yahoo, AOL, Google, MySpace, Microsoft, IBM, Verisign, and many others. Its harder for multiple players in participating in an open standard environment to agree on all aspects of the UX early on, but OpenID will get there. And when it does, website operators and end users will have a common standard to work with, not a menagerie of proprietary implementations.

Some counter “anecdotes” where OpenID is benefiting website operators – seven case studies of successful OpenID deployments at http://www.janrain.com/openid/casestudies

Have a look at implementations at Interscope Records (www.interscope.com) or UserVoice (www.uservoice.com) to see how the OpenID UX can be more intuitive and “facebook-like” In these cases it doesn’t even have to be OpenID or Facebook, it can be both in one easy to deploy, easy to use package.

By: Tyssen

Tyssen — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 06:54:20 +0000

I still cannot comprehend how Facebook or any other social network is supposed to replace email.

Just one example – I don’t bother emailing my family photos or videos of us and the kids any more; I got them to sign up to Facebook and post them there instead.