Facebook timeline changes affects contact books, e-mails
Blogosphere alight with fresh condemnation over changes to service
TechLife | 02 Jul 2012 :
Facebook users upset about the e-mail addresses they listed on the social networking site being suddenly changed have something else to fret about: altered address books and missing e-mails.
The latest gripe with Facebook to light up the blogosphere apparently affects people with mobile devices or other software that synchronises their address book with their Facebook contacts.
Analysis
Niall Kitson
TechCentral.ie
Incredibly, Facebook has found yet another way to alientate its users. That the social network has to force its e-mail service on users is bad enough, but for messages to go astray altogether is a disastrous situation.
For a company that trades on the size of its user base, constantly annoying its population is only going to drive people to mobile apps (some of them third party) and even competitors like Twitter and Google+ who, while hardly perfect themselves, at least don't make it so hard to keep up to date with privacy settings.
Last week, Facebook users learned the company quietly changed the e-mail addresses displayed on their Timeline pages to a @Facebook.com email address. On Twitter and in Facebook's community forums, users expressed outrage that Facebook seemingly made the change without letting them know first.
Now there might be more cause for concern. News website CNet was quick to log users' outrage.
One Adobe employee, in her personal blog, wrote: "Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work e-mail address with my Facebook e-mail address. He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address. And even worse, the e-mails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They've vanished into the ether."
Apparently the e-mails were lost even though on Facebook she switched out the @Facebook address with her correct one.
Blue also asserts that "automatic altering of users' contacts without notification was, in fact, disturbingly actually built into Apple's new iOS 6 Facebook integration: Facebook for iOS will change address books without any warning."
IDG News Service