Web In Depth

I was just going through a very interesting post on ReadWriteWeb on whether Facebook apps had peaked in popularity or not. I must say I agree with most of what is said and thought of writing my experience on those issues.

One point that came up was how Facebook users were getting tried of all the applications. I for one had always viewed most of the applications as worthless from the start and made it a point to stay clear of them.

From the first day I joined I got invited to become a vampire, zombie, or werewolf. I accepted those apps as my friends sent the invitation, but soon found out there was nothing exciting about them. The same goes for most of the game like apps. The method of playing these games is you click a button and then it tells if you won or not. I have no active part in the actual action itself. I couldn’t believe that anyone can find it interesting to do this sort of silly activity. I mean true games are at least more fun and some even improve hand eye coordination.

Another fact is the shear amount of invitations you get to add a new app. It takes a lot of my time to accept or reject each request. So now I have just let the invitations grow and just ignore them for most of the time. My procedure is go through new invitations quickly and only add something if it looks like worthwhile. The result is I have hundred of invitations in my request page and growing.

A very important point that was in the original post is how some applications forced the user to send invitation to others if he wants to use it. Another even more disgusting practice is how some allow the user to use the app and then ask for invitations to revel the result. This happened to me in a quiz I took. Although I found the quiz interesting I couldn’t believe that they ask me to invite friends to see the score. I got around it, because when I invited it asks for confirmation which shows my result. So I just canceled the invitation after viewing my score. Anyway I have personally decided that I will not add any application if they ask for invitations first. This is very undemocratic method to popularize once app and should be stopped. Luckily it seems I am not the only one with this frustration as there now is a group on Facebook called No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application! dedicated for this. The first thing I did after reading that post was sign up to that group.

According to RWW the number of users of the most popular applications are becoming less. I myself haven’t experienced that personally; probably because I am still testing them out, but I can guess the sort of fatigue that must be setting up in frequent users. Even though the apps are popular they create lot of clutter. For example if we take supperwall or funwall I noticed that some days the messages posted are too much, and people tend to put up whatever they like. This is in some ways good as it increase social sharing, but I feel that there is a fundamental difference between sharing in normal life and in social media. That is in life we only share the most vivid and exciting things (not everything), but in the web we can so easily share something we find mildly interesting at that very moment. it is exactly this that leads to the feeling of noise. This is something we need to look in a larger context of all new social interaction taking place on the web. The question hear is “When do we draw the limit?”

In a sense most of the application developers and users of Facebook have not realized what an important social platform Facebook is. After all I feel it as a great concept of building social community between diverse individuals in all corners of the planet. Still most users tend to use Facebook just for fun and not at the true potential of interaction. Developers has so far created a multitude of useless apps and only a few that enhance the social accept of Facebook.

RWW raises the question of whether this is a good thing and answer in the affirmative. I tend to agree with them. It is time the users took control of what essentially is there community. It is time to stop developers running amok with whatever they want. It is time that Facebook administrators impose more strict rules on apps especially stricter invite rules. The more the spread of an app depends on satisfaction of the users the more demand on developers to build better apps. Better hear means a increase in our productivity.

So friends it is time to take action. If you have been disgruntled and wishing things were different it is time to send a message across to everyone that you want a better Facebook tomorrow. If you are one of those who think everything is cool then time to think how much better Facebook can be and how you can contribute to making it better.

Never fear to take up a stand, after all Facebook belongs to all of us.