2 Comments »Facebook added a small feature this afternoon which sends birthday notifications to users via email. This is an extremely useful feature and I’m guessing many people will leave this on. The only problem with this service is that you aren’t provided with your friend’s e-mail address. Instead you simply receive a notification.
There are currently a number of other applications on Facebook for birthday reminders, as well as those that help you send friends gifts on birthdays as Harry Huai Wang writes. This will definitely hurt applications like Birthday Alert as it practically duplicates that application’s functionality.
Developing an application based on a single feature on Facebook is always an extremely risky activity. Unfortunately the developers of Birthday Alert will find that out the hard way. Now you won’t forget birthdays anymore as long as you are connected to your friends on Facebook! In order to manage the birthday alert notifications you can head over to the email notifications page in your account settings.
I think the fact that you have to opt IN for this means it won’t have as much impact on those applications as it would were all users automatically opted-in… it’s good to see Facebook have learnt some lessons on that front
[...] This is less of a hack and more of a good activity to get in the habit of. Whether or not you are using Facebook to do this, you should be wishing everybody you know a happy birthday. Facebook has done most of the work for you, by tracking all of your contacts’ birthdays, they even recently added birthday email notifications. [...]