Hey, I got an email

From: Facebook
Subject: Joe Bloggs has sent you a message

Hi,

This is an email from Facebook. Joe Bloggs has sent you a message, but instead of telling you what that message might possibly be, we’re going to insist that you click this link and enter our bespoke email system instead.

Never mind that you already have a perfectly good email client with spam filtering, contacts, backup and centralised storage. It doesn’t matter that other social networking and communication sites seem to manage at least quoting the message, we’re going to insist on sending all your Facebook messages, wall posts and alerts this way.

But of course if you don’t like this system you can go away, except that all your friends will continue to use Facebook’s closed wall environment to post their events, messages and group messages, and if you’re not on Facebook … well, you can’t play.

Which really makes you wonder why your friends still use Facebook? Maybe that’s because if you get fully sucked into our happy little community you’ll be at one with the messages, walls and groups we’ve created for you… but goodness if you want one iota of flexibility about the way your content and communications comes through our site, you’re in for a fun little ride.

While we’re here, would you like to become a vampire, a zombie or maybe you’d like a super duper poke? We’ll just go ahead and keep asking.

Perhaps when you visit you’ll congratulate us on a job well done. It really does show how building a membership-based community where we define all the apps can work wonders for our traffic and advertisers. It’s an Internet within the Internet, because – y’know, the first one didn’t work so well.

Yours,

The Facebook Team