Facebook email switch continues causing problems - latimes.com

About 10 days ago Facebook showed its utter contempt for its users by changing their e-mail addresses without warning, and without even telling them afterwards. Perhaps it's time to jump ship. Facebook email switch continues causing problems - latimes.com

After causing a raucous week by changing users' listed email addresses to ones ending in @facebook.com, Facebook's switch is causing yet another embarrassment for the company and problem for many users.

The email switch has gone beyond the walls of Facebook, according to various users, who are saying that the change is affecting the emails listed in their contact books.

Across the Web, people are saying the emails listed for many of their contacts in their address books have been replaced by @facebook.com emails.

One of the things that got me using Facebook was that it enabled me to keep in touch or get in touch with old friends by finding their conact information, and they could get in touch with me by finding my e-mail address. But Facebook went and destroyed that functionality by replacing my real e-mail address with a bogus one, because the @facebook.com address that they replaced it with doesn't even work. I've sent a few test e-mails to it, and none of them have shown up on Facebook.

OK, I've changed my bogus e-mail address back to my real one, but most of my friends haven't, because most of them probably don't even know that Facebook has changed their addresses.

So Facebook have destroyed their own most usefulm function.

But it's worse than that, they've changed the address books on lots of people's mobile phones, if they were linked to Facebook, and as a result people are losing important e-mail's because Facebook have hijacked their address books. Perhaps that should be the subject of a class action lawsuit, sueing Facebook for interfering with people's mail.

The Facebook Email Fiasco Might Be Worse Than We Thought (Updated)

CNET reports a multitude of user complaints after the big obnoxious switch-over, citing claims that Facebook is "changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail." Some Facebookers are seeing messages (inadvertently) sent to their @facebook accounts vanishing into nothing, while others have noticed every email address in their phone overwritten by Facebook:

So maybe it's time to bail out of Facebook.

What is the alternative?

Well there are things like Linked-in, and Google+, and for the academically incline, academia.edu but perhaps it's time for Google to dust off their little-known and well-hidden alternative to Facebook: Orkut.

They don't show it any more in the Google menus.They don't publicise it at all, but it has thousands of users in Latin America and Asia, where it has been very popular.

So how about joining Orkut now, and then leaving messages on Facebook asking all your Facebook friends to meet you there?

I'll be visiting Facebook a lot less frequently now, but I'll still let my Twitter tweets be posted on Facebook -- I just won't see many comments that people make on Facebook.

Leaving Plaxo

I just had the enormously frustrating experience of trying to update a friend's address on Plaxo.

I joined Plaxo a few years ago -- it seemed like a good idea at the time. It promised to keep your address book up to date by automatically updating your address book whenever your friends updated theirs, if they were members of Plaxo.

But they have just revamped their operation to make it enormously difficult to navigate and use the system, and I spent a frustrating half hour with my friend's new e-mail address on my clipboard trying to reach a place where I could enter it. I was asked to update my status. I was asked to approve connections with six other people I'd never heard of in my life before. When, after about half an hour, I finally found the address book and could click on the thing to edit his address, I couldn't find the field to enter his new address. The only editable field was "Category" and I could not scroll the screen left, right, up or down to find any more fields. They've obviously designed their interface for monitors much bigger than mine, and until I can afford a new monitor, Plaxo is altogether useless to me.

Why is it that when these web outfits do one thing and one thing well, they suddenly leave their core business and try to become a shoddy imitation of Facebook? And in doing so, stop doing the one thing they did well, that makes them worth joining? I'm already on Facebook, I don't need another version. I'm already on Linked-In. I don't need Plaxo Pulse as well. And since they've made it impossible to do the thing I joined them for, I'm leaving. If they'll let me, that is.