I understand your sentiment, but at least the @facebook email address sends incoming messages to your Facebook notification center. The switch shouldn't have been automatic, but it is a fairly slick and useful feature.
If by "useful feature" you mean "absolute abomination". If someone tries to send me an email and it goes to my notification center, I will never see it. That completely destroys the entire point of me listing my email on my profile.
Again, you're just talking about the automatic switch, which I also think is an abomination. I was talking about the @facebook email feature itself, which for someone who uses facebook (unlike yourself) is a reasonable feature.
"at least" means that, even though the automatic switch was a bad idea, "at least" it's still doing something useful.
Except its not. It's actively counterproductive. Anyone who tries to send to that address will incorrectly believe I will see their message, and yet I never will. For people like you it may be useful, but for people like me it is an anti-feature. That address should never have been made visible on my profile without my express permission.
Again, the only problem here is that they automatically switched the email address on your profile. If it was opt-in, then people who actually use facebook and want the feature (not you, clearly) can use it.
Even if they didn't automatically hide my old email address, merely making the @facebook.com one visible on my profile is an anti-feature. So no, the problem isn't that they automatically switched my visible email address, it's that they enabled a "feature" for me at all that turns out to be an anti-feature. Removing my real email from my profile was just the icing on that shit sandwich.
It's ludicrous to call that an "anti-feature." The feature may very well have been active on your account for years without you even knowing. Yet again, the only bad thing is their choice to replace your personal email address with their own.
It's unnecessary. Why would someone email my Facebook instead of emailing me? If they want to send a Facebook message, there's this nifty button called 'Message' for that very purpose. Facebook is Microsoft circa 2003.
Facebook has a billion users, and it's not at all inconceivable that this feature would be useful to a large quantity of them. I suspect that many users, especially younger ones, are more connected and engaged with their Facebook account that with their email. Certainly many Facebook users send far more Facebook messages than emails. Facebook is similar to Microsoft circa 2003 in the sense that a single tech-savvy individual is not their sole concern in product design.
