Facebook Application fatigue

If you are one of those fellows who hates to see his facebook profile full of application requests, this is a good read for you: I have just over two hundred friends on ‘facebook’ and yet I still can’t see any point to it. off late I have been logging in just to clear the backlog of invitations to pointless applications that allow me to find out ‘who will try to murder me’ and ‘who will try to save me’ and the likes, like I am requested to open something called as ‘lifebox’, which pops out with ‘gift’ for the day. This is not just it, if you want me to mock some other applications with meagre code and functionality I am all ready for it, I don’t quite understand how people let ‘third party’ websites to access their information and too without their consent. Facebook is already trading off your information, isn’t that enough for you kiddo?? Or don’t you feel ‘noise’ on the otherwise social network or is it just me who am having this weird feeling? I don’t know how many of you consider ‘facebook’ a boring venture now, but I never did and my feelings changed like anything after two years of existence on the network. There is no extension to the network beyond the people who already know you somehow or there is some connectivity, I believe ‘facebook’ gives you no functionality to demonstrate your value to the broader network and this is very unlike of other social networks like ‘Digg’ and ‘StumbleUpon’ or twitter for that purpose where you follow people and get followed purely because of common interests, inspirations and purposes. ‘Facebook is effectively static’ as written by Robin Cannon, who blogs regularly on his site ‘fog of eternity’, and add to this static nature, the application part of the facebook. If I am not lying, my profile reads as 251 application requests and 233 game requests and a few cause requests as well, who is to blame for it all, not the sending parties, they obviously are caught in the viral trap of the applications that demand them to send requests to twenty or ten people before installation to their profile nor or the people who develop these applications for facebook, it is their business, they do it in fair or unfair way and it works for them! The site is popular with such people because it is effectively a provider of simple and time wasting entertainment, few of the applications provide any functionality and those applications are so easily lost in the morass that they can’t develop. There are evidences that facebook users are beginning to suffer from something called as ‘application fatigue’. And there is growing discontent on the amount of noise that ‘application platform’ has generated in the facebook ecosystem. The facebook platform allowed application developers to flood the site with the applications both useful and not<7 out of ten are useless> and because of the way it was set up, the platform encouraged the developers to trick the users into sending out mass invites, this increased the noise on the network to tenfold and decreased the enjoyment of social networking for some people. I am not the first one to show the discontent with all this, I am sure if you are reading this you too belong to same class, in just over a month 65thousand people have joined the group, ‘No I will NOT invite twenty friends just to add your application’, and more than42232 people have signed a petition calling on facebook to step in and stop developers from using this viral scheme of things for their own gains. Facebook currently has some 16thousand applications on board, how many of them are useful?? How many of them are just disguised advertisements and information sucking tools?? How many of them are facebook approved?? How many of them are you using?? Now a real bad part of the applications: Besides annoying users like me with spam and scam every day and not to mention of the notifications that I get when I automatically become someone’s best friend just because I happen to like his status update most times and get tagged in someone’s murderer application, ahh it annoys me like nothing else, I am ready to baby sit for a day but spare me of these application requests and trauma!! Now I happened to search for some good applications on facebook, spent some days in this venture, no doubt I found some of them, of course I needed a dummy profile to experiment with all that devil developers develop and protect people in my list from getting really annoyed on my research, I found something which is quite a thing to worry or panic, you can say so.. yeah most of the facebook applications do not have a published ‘privacy policy’, after all privacy policy is where the company spells out exactly what they can and will do with your personal user information. The top 25 facebook applications disappointed me a bit, 36% of them have no published privacy policy and just offer you a link after you authorize the application, it was hard to believe that 12 of these facebook applications are facebook verified which obviously means that they are trustworthy when it comes to sharing information, but where is your privacy policy boss?? How facebook defends itself. There is an anonymous blogger who is owner of the site referred to as ‘social hacking’, he writes in his blog that “facebook’s ‘Application Terms Of Service” warns you<shouts at you in UPPERCASE> that “ALL PLATFORM APPLICATIONS ARE PROVIDED AS IS” and AGREE THAT YOU DOWNLOAD, INSTALL AND/OR USE ANY PLATFORM APPLICATIONS AT YOUR OWN DISCRETION AND RISK” Within your privacy settings you’re also informed that: “When you authorize an application, it will be able to access any information associated with your account that it requires to work. The application can access information like your personal info and photos as well as your friend’s personal info, depending on their settings” But the question still remains, why doesn’t facebook make applications offer their own privacy policy?? Although it is not in the best interests of facebook to do so and not really feasible at this stage but there is something that it can do, there is already a link “report this application” provided at the bottom of the application pages. The link currently allows the users to report privacy violations, so why not let users report for the lack of privacy policy as well?? Although the majority of users would still probably never look at the privacy policy even if the changes were made, having them consistently and prominently displayed would at least put some pressure on developers about how they are going to use the information of the users.   Solution Most of the facebook applications are lame, if not they are stupid time wasters and spamming machines, however there are few applications that are good to use and you will feel good using them, here is the list I could gather from internet, I am not using any of these so it is entirely as per some prominent users and bloggers review!! Don’t forget to read “privacy policy”

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