I agree with you, but there's another issue here: some of your friends may not actually respond to email messages. Personally, I'm a fan of email and letter writing (and not a fan of the phone), but I've fallen out of touch with several friends because if you don't contact them via Facebook or Twitter (I do neither), you won't hear back from them.
Another thing email doesn't do well: the idea of "I have something to say, but passively". Maybe you want to announce a change in your life, or a party, or some thought that you had. It's far less annoying to put it on Facebook where your friends can digest it (or not) at their leisure, rather than in an email demanding to be read.
"Hey, what's your new address?"
"I emailed it to you, go search through your messages"
The only problem I see with your email sentence is that some clients lack a decent search functionality.
Some improvements and it would IMHO be as easy, if not easier, as opening Facebook, trying to find a contact and fight against the timeline to find the information you are looking for.
I think the party part is a bit of personal choice. If I run a party I want to notify $foo people. And $foo is always a smaller number than my Facebook "friends". I just prefer the ability to select people and only tell them what I want to say without creating tons of groups for everything.
This might be locale-specific, but there's a lot of times I'm notified of a party/get-together via a Facebook post saying "I'll be down at $taphouse tonight at 9, feel free to stop by!" That's a very passive invite, and Facebook (or Twitter or G+ et al) is perfect for that.
I get what you are saying. The one good thing about Facebook is that it took a lot of that fluff out of my inbox. But could I not have learnt to manage/gloss over it?
The thing that Facebook does well - is tracking down contacts - to add to your 'address book.' It's not so easy in the world of email. That's because we aren't publishing our address books publicly (probably for good reason.)
You're missing the point -- those people aren't your friends anyway. The fact that you can "like" a picture of someone's kid or say happy birthday on their Wall doesn't change that fact.
Facebook can be a great tool for sharing photos and other things with your friends. But most of what is actually happening on Facebook is voyeurism -- you get to stalk people whom you sort of know.
I know hating FB is all the rage (and sometimes well deserved) but you're attributing your feelings about FB to all the users. Failbook.com isn't indicative of all the FB users.
