Facebook, Notifications, and Email Hacking
Recently the Facebook iPhone App added support for delivering push notifications. They are fantastic.
This is the perfect use case for push notifications, because there is a fundamental difference between a “notification” and a “message.” A message is something I usually have to act on. A notification is just an “oh, by the way…”
Here’s the problem with confusing the two:
OK Facebook, I get it. People are doing things on Facebook. Thanks!
Sending notifications through email is basically hacking the email system. I certainly want to know when Bob comments on my status, but I don’t want that information in what is basically a throwaway email. Email is designed for messages.
Now that I have push notifications, I can finally stop this constant emailing. Can’t I?
Sounds easy! Let’s just click that (awesomely obfuscated) link and I’m sure we’ll find a simple checkbox to turn off the oh my god…
OK, deep breath. I can do this.
Do I want an email when someone “Sends me a message?” Well, yes, of course, that’s what email is for. Check.
Do I want an email when someone “Adds me as a friend?” OK, probably, this doesn’t happen very often anymore since everyone I ever knew growing up is accounted for. Check.
Do I want an email when someone “Posts on my Wall?” Hm. Well, now I have to think back to the sorts of things that people post on my wall. Sometimes it’s “Let’s get lunch today!” Other times it’s just fluff. I guess I should probably leave it on? Check.
No wait. I’m not actually making any progress here; I thought I came here to turn off email notifications? Everything just seems so important on this page…I mean, they wouldn’t give you so many options all at once if it wasn’t really necessary right?
What this page is, is basically a huge UI cop-out. They created it such that when you yell at them about spamming your inbox, they can direct you here and say “look, you have complete control over what we send you; this is your problem.”
I would much prefer that Facebook take a stand and make these decisions for me, for everyone, about what’s important and what’s not. What this page should look like is:
Notification Settings
And, of course, there will be cases where you’ll want to block very specific things, but Facebook already does a superb job of exposing that elsewhere, for instance on your newsfeed. You can silence particular apps (cough mafia wars), block people, whatever. And the UI for that appears right when you need it.
Just kidding Drew, you’re my boy, dawg.

I finally sat down and published