Regarding the person who preferred being contacted via facebook messages than email–I think this will become increasingly common, especially among young people. Some people get hundreds of emails each day, and email sign-ups are no good if they don't get opened.

At the nonprofit I work for, we've got maybe 2,700 emails in our list but consistently we only see around 462 opens for each monthly newsletter (our Facebook profile has just under 300 friends). We take this to mean that for 2,200 people it either goes to their Junk Folder or they get so many emails a day that they don't take the time to read ours. Either way, I don't fret about email address count because I know a Facebook friend is just as valuable. I'm not just making that up, either–the metrics prove it. Facebook is consistently in our top three referring sites for website traffic and usually when we post a Facebook update we see a bigger spike in site traffic than when we send out an e-blast. We also see much better click-through conversion rate for our Facebook friends than we do for our e-news signups. So if anything, a Facebook friend is more valuable to us than an email.

We're probably going to move to Pulse (http://www.bigtimedesign.ca/pulse/) before the end of the year. Basically, the move stems from this belief (rooted in stats like the one cited above) that what matters is subscription–the channel, be it Facebook, email, Twitter, etc. is irrelevant; the constituent is all we count regardless of which channel they prefer to communicate with us. It saves us from spamming the same person with the same message three or four times. Plus, it offers some useful analytics.

Full disclosure: I know a guy who works at Pulse (actually he might be the owner, I'm not totally sure–I only met him the once but we've emailed a couple times). I'm not trying to plug the service and I don't really care if you sign up for it. But I figured I'd disclose this information for transparency's sake.