Facebook is often referred to as a social utility. It’s become an important aspect of many people’s daily lives, used to organise events, stay in touch and so on. Some have practically stopped using email for personal communications: Facebook can keep all your friends’ addresses so you don’t have to remember them.
Not long ago, I received an email from Facebook which read:
Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.
To reset your email notification settings, go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
I wasn’t very impressed with this message, but there have been worse IT issues.
Today, I went to log in, only to be greeted by the following page:
This, combined with the previous message, started to get me thinking. People are relying on Facebook: they’re using it as a utility, like email, like the telephone, and these things are designed so they are very resilient. Email is designed so it will always get through in the end (at least somehow). Telephone service is practically ubiquitous, and we get really annoyed when it isn’t working. Advertisers are increasingly relying on Facebook to recruit customers for them.
That all being so, shouldn’t the technology be a little bit more reliable?
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