You guys never did male beauty pageants for charity? We have them like twice a year here, and they're quite successful and overall a lot of fun (granted, I never dress up... just laugh at my friends a lot).
And if he's actually a cross-dresser, props. He's probably the richest cross-dresser in the world.
I'm working on a project now that will aggregate self-motivated learning online. Watch a lecture on YouTube? (Many universities post them). Get credit for it. Start a discussion with others who also watched it. Ask and answer questions. Find like-minded people and learn with each other, set your own challenges and goals.
That's only half of it, but the core idea is this: We learn online already. Pave the cowpaths. Give people credit for what they already do.
I'm also looking for a co-founder. Anyone interested in this project (suggestions, more info, etc.), I'd love to chat: http://scr.im/michaelhart
Yes! It may be easy to spoof outside of Facebook, but internally FB routes it's own emails, so when you use Titan to read a message from another Titan email address, Facebook can show you thatbit's genuine,
Spammers can create shell accounts, but they can't friend you, so when you receive email from someone you don't know, Facebook can shown you their friends list and public profile, or use that to prioritize your inbox.
Soo... basically whitelisting functionality. Something that we've had for a long time. Only this is automatic since people are (hopefully) more diligent about their Facebook friends list than their Gmail/Hotmail/Outlook address book.
That's my SWAG, although you can go a little further than your friends list given a social graph. You can score an email based on all sorts of social data. Are you friends? Friends of a common friend? Do you have "likes" in common? Do you belong to common groups? Have you commented on the same thing? And so on.
Any large email player can do some of the same things with a history of emails, but FB could (I am only guessing) do interesting things.
Whitelisting is one approach to the spam problem. Inbox prioritization is an interesting problem as well. Once we have emails in your message box, you could log into FB and find 100 or more emails even after filtering for spam. So... Which emails should appear on your home page and which should wait quietly in your inbox for you to take action?
And so Facebook offers a switch: "only accept mail from friends and sites I've liked".
If you've got a popular walled garden, making the jungle outside even scarier, and thus forcing a stronger commitment to the tended 'inside', can be good business.
Although this is already the case with Google Profiles - the url is the same as your gmail account name unless you opt out/change it (most people don't)... yet google handles the spam well.
The interface'll have the be unbelievably amazing and innovative for this to even make a dent in people's minds. And as others have pointed out, Facebook.com is not associated with professionalism (unless you're a recruiter or tech blogger or something).
All in all, I think nobody will care at the end of the day.
> The interface'll have the be unbelievably amazing and innovative for this to even make a dent in people's minds
I guarantee you that they are going to become the default address between people 16 and under. My brother is 16 and doesn't have an email address, but he does have a facebook account.
1: My daughter just moved into her own house today.
2: Wow, awesome! I should call them to congratulate her! Whats the new house number?
1: Oh, she doesn't have a landline, she just uses her cell phone.
2: That's the scariest thing I've heard so far today.
1: ???...
To the newest generations email is an antiquated technology that has no real use among their peers. Eventually they might get some email address for college/professional use, but that's practically akin to a fresh college grad now getting a fax machine because "its what we use at the office".
Not shocking.
Edit: Unless by "the scariest thing" you mean the idea of xyz@facebook.com becoming the default for the >17 crowd, in which case, disregard my nonsense.
I think your comparisons are completely wrong. Is there anything you could do with land lines that you cannot do with mobile phones? No, but there are lots of things email does that Facebook does not do (and vice versa).
Send/receive faxes to/from a dedicated fax amchine, use an analog modem or coupler, connect multiple extensions to the same line, connect an Asterisk box, play DTMF tones into the receiver and have it dial, pulse dial by toggling the 'hang-up' switch...
What's especially strange about this tend is how something like gmail blows facebook messaging away in terms of UX.
A lot of users though seem to have made Facebook their web world and are willing to accept a crappier messaging system for the convenience.
And it's not early adopters making the switch. I've been using FB for well over 6 years, but I still prefer to send an email over an fb message. Most of my friends are the same.
I may be being slow on the uptake not to have spotted this before, but it hit me last week -
99% of my personal mail - both email and physical mail - is either companies sending out notices (adverts, bills, whatever...) or websites I subscribe to telling me there's something I should see. Direct personal communication has very largely shifted off the platform.
Interestingly, that doesn't yet seem to be the case for corporate communication (into which I include somem voluntary work I do). I still send and receive plenty of email on that account, but this has me wondering for how much longer....
And Facebook basically still has those things that are the non-personal emails, they just took them out of the mail stream and put them into your wall.
Cut that crap out. That's why people hate email. It is trivial in almost all cases nowadays to get off of those sorts of lists.
Today I have gotten emails: interview info from MS, an announcement as to why the University's power went out, payroll setup info for my Uni, tech advice from a startup friend, and an email from my TA about my lab today.
None of that would have been visible/accessible or possible to communicate to me through anything besides email.
Actually, that _is_ pruned. I'm only getting the notices I want / need for various reasons, not the spam, and do periodically dump senders who aren't interesting any more. Yet I still end up with eMail as overwhelmingly a commercial medium.
This is very true. I'm 20 and I've never used my personal email regularly and I'm sure most of my friends haven't either. We've always used MSN or AIM and more recently Facebook to keep in touch.
I'm a 30-somthing urban professional and almost no one I know still uses MSN or AIM. Tons of people use gchat and gmail, including people who used facebook first. Looking at my adium contacts right now, there are more people signed into gchat than facebook chat, only one signed into MSN and AIM.
My wife's friends are the same way. Sure, lots of them have facebook accounts, but all of her friends and business contacts, new and old, email and gchat regularly. She doesn't even have a facebook account yet and has no intention of ever setting one up.
In fact, I feel less pressure to use facebook these days than I did a year or two ago. I don't even go on it anymore other than when I'm working on apps that use the graph api. My wall is filled with stuff I don't care about and if I want to contact someone I email, chat or text them.
But at least here in the US, every incoming first year student at a university in college has to have an email, and receives multiple emails per day from professors, administrators, etc. Email is still a huge part of the current college infrastructure, that could change, but I don't see it happening overnight.
I still email occasionally but only when necessary. That's why I said I'm not a regularly user. My point is that I've never used email for friend to friend communication.
In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting questions on here. Facebook's default method of identification is and always has been (since thefacebook.com times) an email address.
If they are launching their own email client, it will be silly for them to require you to provide them with another email address in order to use their site. How will they authenticate people? Or they won't and there will be a ton of spambots with facebook accounts. Either way, I think it's an interesting question and I'll be interested to see their solution.
He'll have an email address by the time he gets to college. There are still plenty of people who'd prefer to keep their personal and collegiate/professional lives separate.
I doubt it. Most schools block Facebook, whereas most do not block Gmail (many rely on Gmail themselves). Using a Facebook email is just asking for accessibility problems.
Initially you needed a .edu email to register. Then they opened facebook to everyone (any email). Now you don't you need an email address to register? Or did your brother used a throw-away email (gmail?) account?
Despite my occasional pleas, it's already the messaging service of choice between my friends and friends-of-friends. They say it's easier to add people to a discussion, and it's hard to fight the momentum.
Not probably, it definitely is. Sir Ken Robinson is amazingly brilliant, and his value for creativity is revolutionary. Creativity defines the world we live in. He defines creativity as "the process of coming up with original ideas that have value." Just think about that. Everything in the world that we use and take for granted is the result of some creative person somewhere taking a risk. The importance of creativity is the most undervalued characteristic of people in the world. We focus more on SAT and ACT scores, both of which are only a fraction as important.
It's not under-valued, it's non-valued. As in, it's impossible to attach a value to someone's creativity, because, as far as anyone has been able to determine, it's not quantifiable. You can't hire with "creative" as a criteria unless you can create some sort of test that will accept creative people and reject non-creative people. Since there is no such test, we don't bother to look for it when hiring, and thus don't build businesses that depend on their employees to be creative, because they haven't been filtered as such.
Which leads me to think that this just may be a setting stone to future, more important memos. No sense in scaring them unless they wanted to secure the channel for something else.
Large companies have often used internal memos on purpose for leaking information. On some level, they want the information to be leaked (companies with thousands of staff makes it nearly impossible for it not to be).
It also implies that they'll open the email, which most average people won't do unless they know the sender or are otherwise expecting an email.