I’m surprised Facebook would do this. They should want keep everyone on Facebook. People often refer to messages they receive on Facebook as “emails” already, so this surprises me.

This is really an awesome move by Facebook, I am sure it would be great help in using Facebook connect for complete signup on third party sites. They should completely open up their platform and be more transparent like Twitter.

btw, the overwhelming majority of developers prefer sending notifications. We don’t even plan to use email notifications. Remember: the most successful apps on facebook are games, and they require immediate attention.

This is stupid. Opens the backdoor to massive email harvesting.

re: apps, didn’t Facebook say a while back they’d stop apps accessing our little pop-up box alerts thing? I still get a tonne of spam through there that I can’t seem to stop, I thought they were blocking that…

Thank goodness!!! I have been waiting for this for a while…I hope they will make an app for smart phones that will access my GPS, and they can send people out to hassle me throughout the day…That should be the next logical step…

The notifications window is going away? Is something going to replace it?

(I’m asking as a user. I neither develop nor use FB apps.)

I’m curious about this, I agree it opens up the walled garden approach fb was taking. I’m thinking this also comes to cutting costs on the back end, all those servers cURLing and using xmpp to forward notices.

I am not sure why Facebook is playing more and more with user privacy. FB must realise, people donot really read user agreements and putting these javascript popups taking people’s permission doesnot at all mean Facebook is being very honest.

they will use it for their own apps only (Photos, comments , boards etc.) 3rd party apps will not be able to send notifications, starting in 30 days

Great news. When FB redesigned their site several months ago, they killed apps that relied email notifications to members. Ours required notifications when someone accepts your invite to a networking meeting, but after FB reduced an apps ability to notify, became problematic so we had to rely on FB Connect to get people to sign up on the site with email addresses. A bitter App experience.

Great move and provides FB users with greater app functionality. Still bitter, but not as much.

Recent changes at Facebook seem to let people use it without having to login to facebook.
e.g the new: reply to feature in the emails I get on my comments. That makes me wonder if Yahoo’s, “Social Network” inside email might be what all this ends up looking like.

I want to see them support both the Inside FB notifications alerts as well as give me the email address.

The Facebook notification window is being “replaced” by something called a Dashboard – and counters – for each app.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Roadmap_Dashboards

They are doing this because of Stiff competition they are facing! I am sure that many will give their secondary email addresses and not their primaries!

They’re doin’ it rong. Don’t Facebook and the app developers understand that Facebook messaging is BETTER than email? The face that all senders are authenticated and authorized means little spam and great control for both FB and the user. FB should, instead, expand the functionality of the messaging services, allow POP or IMAP access, and work with other social networking sites to do cross-domain messaging with federated authentication and authorization. Then app developers would come BEGGING for the chance to be inside.

facebook is very very big and is still growing but the number of users pissed with it is growing too. users like me who has been using facebook for 3 years now are very disappointed with the direction of facebook is going recently. site is getting slower, scammy apps keep on spamming and nobody seems to stop them. smart people will leave facebook with time and only myspace population will remain there which will make facebook another myspace.
Its the users what adds value to the social network in the end.

Facebook is getting out of the deliverability game, a very very wise move IMHO. Now I get to decide which apps I want to hear from and witch ones get marked spam and eventually blacklisted like all other spam.

Goodbye Zynga, RockYou, and the rest of the virals. Now please get them out of my stream.

Personally I think this is great! However, I feel it could be detrimental to social networks if 3rd parties can gain access to their members (specifically their email). An example would be an app developer that works with a few social networks and pulls from one and directs to another. Eventually I feel people will gravitate towards niche social networks and will likely have few accounts all intertwined…

Finally!!

Stream posts will still be allowed. Notifications are going away, however, which means app developers will be hard-pressed to send even more ‘updates’ in your home page stream.

now facebook lets app do their spammy action outside facebook so that users cant blame facebook for this, also this will educate stupid users that singup for everything and add all spammy apps to their profile.

So now I have to wonder if I can trust the third-party app maker to only email me notifications and not use the app to harness emails to spam? Awesome! Thanks Facebook!

I’ll have to dig more for this answer, but I’m curious if the app developer actually sees the email address or simply gets access to an interface to send messages. The latter being preferable, such that email addresses aren’t being slurped and sold under an unnecessary, but effective “email required to use this app” modal.

At any rate, apps seem prime to be more spammy under this new developer option.

I didn’t see it, but do the developers get the actual email or just a call/id to send a request to/with?

app makers wouldn’t do that……..would they? Zynga has always been so reputable? (where’s that sarcasm icon?)

Even if they only able to access an interface what’s to stop them from sending a mass “new update” email to all the app users? And hey what if they sell a little space on the bottom of the email to other spammers that aren’t related to the app? nothing wrong with that right?

So let me get this straight — app developers have access to emails, but I can’t cut and paste my friend’s email out of their profile into my address book?

FU Facebook.

This is a great move to keep their 3rd party developers happy.

It’s hard to build a solid business by solely relaying on Facebook’s benevolence.

They can ask the user to permit them to read and store their primary email address from facebook. They will be able to send emails directly to your address.

I ‘m pretty sure there will not be any security issues. After all, facebook developers have proved time and again they are among the most trustworthy people in the business, facebook users are well known for their high level of security awareness and facebook is known to be lightning-fast in detecting and removing malicious apps.

If you want people to be able to contact you through facebook, but don’t want to use your usual address because you’re worried that companies may get it and sell it (as i am). Take control. Generate a disposable email from a site like http://www.whyspam.me (disclosure: i built it) then when you start getting spam, delete it and generate a new one. If someone important mails you, you can give them your direct email address.

I agree, and look forward to the SSN box feature!

The facebook that cared about it’s users is gone. It cares about money now. Pure and simple. Say hello to Greedbook. Decisions will be based on beancounters and ROI. With something this big it has to happen eventually.

Who are you referring to as ‘Stiff competition’?

I am surprised they are not giving developers an easier way to message the user through their own system. Then they can provider controls and protections to their users… and keep them on FB longer.

must be twitter. TC-induced brainwashing

> read and store

So, third party developers are going to get my email, I’ll pass on that. I don’t care who it is, but I already get 100+ emails a day for legit conversations.

> most trustworthy people in the business,
> facebook users are well known for their high level of security awareness
I guess you’re speaking about the very low fraction that knows about the major security threats. If the majority of FaceBook users are anything like my friends, they could care less about security. They just want it to work, and they don’t understand truly what they’re doing. If giving an email or clicking ‘Yes’ to a box gets them to the goal then they will do it.

I highly doubt facebook ever cared about it’s users.

And I don’t feel sorry for any of it’s users either. They voluntarily gave up all of their personal info and expected a website to protect it. People are willingly putting themselves at risk.

I wish I could block every single app on facebook, I don’t want those games, I don’t want those apps, all I want to see is what my friends and fan pages decide to share (pictures and messages), oh and links.

Everything else should have a huge OFF button.

Myspace was killed by Facebook because of all the crap Myspace users kept adding to their personal page, it’s getting worse on Facebook now, the profile pages are better, but everything else is plain annoying.

I think everyone here has it sort of wrong. Yes they are allowing to share email addresses and yes they are going to get rid of notifications. But they are moving more towards in system email messages, with their new applications dashboard they are going to release. So basically another way for apps to spam you.

Speaking as an end-user, I have never once checked my Facebook notifications. I currently have 449 unread notifications. When it reaches 4 digits I usually clear them out (without checking). They’re all spam, as far as I’m concerned.

I do check my email, however. I currently have 0 unread emails. From my perspective, an email is about 100,000x more important than a Facebook notification.

Just one man’s personal opinion.

Thats the tricky part but people will be stupid enough so who blames them for trying

I don’t see the reasoning behind this for Facebook. This could allow social gaming developers to build up a large database of users then on their next game decide to launch one on their own platform to try it out with no restrictions from Facebook on what they can do or how they monetize it.

It’s like I signed up for one service (the Facebook of old) and suddenly I’m getting a new service: a monster that is starting to leak my data all over the place.

All this privacy stuff is an attempt to move Facebook towards the real-time web model.

Great for Facebook. Crappy for me and you.

I was trying to be a little nice. :) I’m sure Zuckerberg cared when he was making a site in college….at least a little.

This lets them wash their hands a bit. If the scammy offers come in emails and not on their servers then facebook did nothing wrong.

[...] Tweets about this great post on TwittLink.com [...]

Honestly since the last month, all I do on Facebook is becoming fan of something. So i doubt this new feature annoys me.

Great move for Facebook and to their app developers. Having the user’s email address is essential for developers to have a direct relationship with the user – the developer does not need to go through FB to contact the user – either to send notifications, or potentially to authenticate the user by sending the user a link with an authentication token to login.

Sharing the user’s email address is also necessary for users to find and connect with each other (independently of Facebook’s graph).

App developers have *always* been able to send a proxied email, through Facebook’s API.
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Proxied_Email

This change will reveal the actual email, in plaintext, so that app developers will be able to send email directly.

igniman was being sarcastic

Apart from what Mark Zuckerberg said, I guess individual facebook users should practice security measures on their own in order to avoid attacks and other privacy issues. Hackers will always be around and it would be an enormous undertaking for facebook to manage 350 million subscribers 24/7.
http://bit.ly/avoid-facebook-hacking

[...] (TechCrunch) – Big changes are coming to Facebook Platform. Today, Facebook is granting developers on Platform the ability to request (or require) users to hand over their email addresses so they they can send periodic messages directly to users. This doesn’t come as a surprise: Facebook first talked about these changes last October and has kept developers updated on the timing in its Developer Roadmap. But it’s a very, very big deal. [...]

[...] CrunchBase Information Read More [...]

I have mixed feeling for this. As a developer it sure make life better for us but as a user we sure need to do more clicks nowadays to login using facebook connect.

Might put people off if they need to handover their email address.

I will still go with the traditional method for now.

As surprising as this may be i have seen this feature in some apps upto a few weeks ago.

[...] Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address (Tech Crunch) [...]

Nice website – good for multiple sign ups for our website testing :)

Facebook is just so so evil.

[...] Starting Today, Facebook Apps Can Ask You To Hand Over Your Email Address [...]

Yikes, I agree with many of you. I think this is the wrong approach for Facebook to be taking. They should want to keep users, and notifications, on their platform; not to an email box.

If an app *requires* me to provide my email address, I will not use it. I don’t need anything that badly – proxy address or not.

Facebook notifications ARE better than email, but somewhere that message got lost – its probably in an inbox somewhere.

Well said Allen.

Isn’t it enough that Facebook credentials are a gateway to people’s email inboxes and their lives and the lives of their families. Now were inviting another level of “harvesting” opportunity. When will social networks adopt stricter encryption. We have ecommerce clients (here at VeriSign) eager to adopt better protection technology — ie,
Extended Validation SSL’s green URL bar, or a combination of that and other handshake
programs. Twitter and Facebook are continually in the news-revealing the daily data breach in
security, user beware.

this is a nice news. I hate that flag always RED becaose someone has visited my farm! this permits people to use the antispam filter. good work! for italians: http://bit.ly/4r1y3s

I am ultra confused about the logic behind this.

Users have had 100% control of what apps could/could not send notifications for as long as I can remember. Some app send me a bunch of useless crap? Poof, blocked from my notifications. Simple, and it worked fine, so I categorically reject any notion this is about giving users more control about who can or cannot contact them. No, it can only be about making Facebook even more attractive to developers (direct user contact database independent of FB’s control) and/or giving FB the illusion of a degree of separation from developer actions, both coming at the cost of the user experience. From a user’s p.o.v. there is no upside to this – for the apps I care about, now I have to decide whether to give them access to my email and, if I do, then go through email, something I have no interest in doing; for the apps I don’t, they were blocked a long time ago.

[...] Facebook integrating site activities with outside email,  3rd party developers will have access to email addresses as well. The issue is only partially [...]

I play Farmville and I really think its a good idea if Zynga separates from FB – it would easy to way I connect with my friends/neighbors. But I’m sure their reasons are business related, Zynga became too big for an alliance. I wrote more here: http://tinyurl.com/y8dyefa

I already avoid most “apps” on FB. There is no way in hell I’ll start turning over my email. As long as we keep supporting the something for nothing mentality, stuff like this will only continue and/or get worse.

I for one am not giving my email address to any of the apps….what a bunch of crap….there is enough junk goes into my email now…who wants to spend more time deleting….and I am not going back and forth to find out notifications or get my gifts or add neighbors….this is a big downhill slide….no one is gonna want this….