I guess I’ve been out of the loop lately, or I’m simply getting old, but I had no idea that the Facebook situation has gotten so bad.
What you see on the left side of this post is taken from my girlfriend’s actual profile. Now, it may not look as ugly as your standard MySpace profile, but content-wise it’s probably much worse. I mean, hot damn, there must be a hundred applications in there (this is just a fraction of it, you should see the full profile)!
Being my old stubborn self I’ve refused most of those zombie/vampire/sandwich/etc useless apps and thus my profile still looks quite clean. But, your average Facebook user will take anything thrown at him/her. Thus, my girlfriend can use her Facebook profile to learn how sexy she is, how sexy Santa Claus is; she can have her name analyzed, she can send and receive gifts, food and other shenanigans, she has a graveyard, she can hug, poke, kick, bump, kiss, greet, twist and snowball fight her friends…and absolutely none of this is in any way useful.
Luckily for us, in Facebook you don’t see most of this unless you yourself are subscribed to it. But still, my hopes that somehow Facebook will be a better, more serious social network than MySpace have vanished the second I saw that profile. You may laugh at MySpace’s ugliness, Facebookers, but your own social network ain’t much better. In fact, my girlfriend has mostly switched to MySpace because “it makes more sense.” Go figure.
The question remains: is there such a thing as a useful social network? I’m looking at you, LinkedIn. If you guys and girls reading this, please don’t let your upcoming API turn LinkedIn into something like this, ok?
All this said, has someone tried subscribing to all possible applications on Facebook just to see what’ll happen? If anyone has such aspirations (and the required patience), I’d like to know.
I had nowhere near as many as your g/f, but I thought I’d take heed and have stripped back the half a dozen items of frippery such as gifts and movie applications that had accumulate on my profile. Now, it’s essentially the bare essentials that are actually useful to me, such as groups and scrabulous
db
I’m going to poke You later tonight, but I must say I absolutely agree! My profile doesn’t have a single application but still I get dozens of invitations per day. Unsubscribing seems to be the only reasonable thing to do.
most annoying is some applications send you emails when you get invited even if you’ve clicked “no” to all email notifications in your preferences. Funwall I think is the worst offender.
@everyone: thanks for the comments, which prove that not everyone enjoys hundreds of mindless apps that do nothing useful (not that there’s anything wrong with it, mind you (: ).
What is crazy about all this is that these applications are so valuable. I quite often see them being sold on the sitepoint.com marketplace for in excess of $5000 each.
They are a complete pain and I have had to educate half of my family of usage of the site to try and prevent their profiles from ending up like your girlfriends.
I have to say, I’ve begun noticing the number of apps that have been piling up on my own Facebook profile. Fun Wall, Super Wall, What I’m Listening To, My Music. It can get a tad out of hand. Not to mention, some of these apps don’t always work.
Just yesterday I made a mental note to start pruning back some of the more pointless ones. Glad to see I’m not the only one coming to this realization.
http://twitter.com/sperling
Stan,
I enjoyed your article, “Facebook Hell”.
I agree that is quite a lot of content. Now if Facebook would pay its members for having all that content, it might be a different story.
I like the new Social Networking site that does pay its users for everything they do on the site. That is Social Networking with a twist and quite profitable.
Noel
That SongBird Guy
Yes, facebook is turning into a hell right now. The apps are killing it.
You neglect to mention that the applications ask you, every time that you subscribe to one, if you would like to place links onto your profile page or not. I have several applications that I am subscribed to and only a few of them have I chosen to place directly on my profile page.
The sad thing is most of the new apps are just built on the idea of “invite your friends and we will show you how cool you are?” - nothing works unless you spam.
The end result is the page kills my N810 browser pretty nicely if I have flash enabled, thanks to the videoplayers in folks superwalls..