We all know Facebook integration is coming to iOS 6 and Mountain Lion sometime this month, but just how deep does the integration go with the operating systems? By the sounds of it, the integration is going to be entrenched in our contacts and email applications once Apple opens the Facebook floodgates.
Contacts will sync with Facebook services, which isn’t that bad of an idea, but along with the syncing will come Facebook email addresses for all of your friends and family. According to our friends over at TUAW, this also means that you’re going to start receiving, and likely sending, email from your Facebook.com email address.
Normally this could be easily avoided, but according to Michael Grothaus, Facebook email addresses have become the primary email address for most of his contacts:
The sync API was pushing the most-recently-added email address, rather than the primary — which automatically meant the @facebook address, since that was newest. While this behavior was deemed to be a bug by Facebook affecting “certain devices” and quickly fixed, our tests now show that the @facebook addresses are still being sync’ed over alongside the user’s real world, primary email address.
Frankly, I’m not a fan of Facebook. It’s not the company; it’s the website. I spend little time on the network already, and I get plenty annoyed when people try to contact me on Facebook instead of sending me an email or text message. It sounds like I’m now going to be inundated with emails from Facebook.com. A lot of these emails may end up lost somewhere in Facebookland, and missed by a lot of people. It’s just not cool, no matter how cool Facebook integration with iOS 6 will be in other places.
Hopefully this gets fixed by the time iOS 6, and Facebook for Mountain Lion, get released later this month. If not, I’m going to be plenty pissed.
