Logged into the internet today (i.e. turned on my monitor) and went to Google News, like you do. Boom, right there, an article from Forbes titled “Facebook’s Email System Does *What* Now?” So I clicked on it with alacrity. (Alacrity™ brand clicking, brought to you today by 5-Hour Energy Drink).
What I read was, to put it plainly, difficult to read. I mean, short of giving you a word-by-word scan of each sentence, it was just hard to parse. Please. Go read it yourself and then hope along with me this man is not a successful novelist.
Not to mention the content he was trying to put across. Did you not bother torturing yourself with his cumbersome use of syntax? I’ll sum up: he claims Facebook is changing e-mail addresses in your cell phone. Balderdash.
I didn’t believe it for a second, so I searched for other, hopefully better written articles. Sure enough, I found another, which said that if you’ve given Facebook permission to sync your contact list with your phone, and if one of your contacts on Facebook did not list an email address on Facebook itself, and was therefore given an @facebook.com address by Facebook, then a bug in the API will indeed have Facebook sync with your phone and change the email address of some of your Facebook contacts.
In other words, that Forbes writer lied by omission. Now, go ahead, call me a fanboi, a Facebook white knight. I know it’s cool to hate on the ‘book and it’s nerdy to say how great the damn thing is. But come on, Forbes, I thought you were about rich people. And rich people are supposed to be smart and educated and stuff. This is not just bad writing, it’s bad journalism.
Or, hey, maybe it is me. Maybe I am too stupid to read Forbes, and what I am calling bad writing is just my own inability to read it. And to read between the lines and glean the truth that the writer left out. Maybe I’m the pot calling the kettle stupid, maybe my own writing is inefficient and misleading.
Whatever the case, the plain truth for us plain folks is: your phone is fine, unless you gave Facebook permission to mess around with it. And if you did that, and you’re rich enough to read Forbes, I don’t know what to tell you. Or how. But I bet you’ll survive this. Go get a 5-Hour Energy Drink, soldier.