Nerve Endings Firing Away

If you are on Facebook, you must have seen your inbox flooded with hundreds of invites either to bitch slap, chug a beer, share a secret, or test your movies trivia IQ. At first, it seems exciting and fun to add all kinds of widgets and goof off doing mostly inane things with your profile and friends but after a while, it gets tiring. You can always tell who has recently joined Facebook by the intensity of their activity in adding apps. While opening up the Facebook API was the best thing Mark Zuckerberg did for his business, it isn’t turning out exactly well for the normally clean interface of the social network. Once I was asked which social network I prefer. I answered Facebook without hesitation simply for the reason that it was clean, easy to navigate, and looked professional as compared to Orkut and MySpace. But if you visit the profiles of Facebook addicts, you might think you have landed on a MySpace page with all the bling. You have to scroll down a mile to write on their wall.

Tim O’Reilly and his O’Reilly Research team recently published a report on the Facebook Application platform. They crunched the numbers on the usage of the umpteen apps that are popping up on Facebook. Surprisingly (or not), they found that among the 5000-odd applications that are available right now, 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications and only 45 apps have 100,000 or more users. Mind you, Facebook has more than 12 million users right now so 100K visitors still isn’t a significant portion of the users. Personally I love some of the apps but some of them are downright distracting. I don’t mind if people choose to add them on their profile but why force me to add them if I just want to see them in action on their profile. I don’t freaking want to add any more apps on my profile unless they seriously enhance my user experience. Heck, there is even an app to check your GMail within Facebook. Can’t I just open a new tab and check my email? Am I that addicted to Facebook that I can’t open any other site? It’s called…Fmail…pretty innovative, huh? Bah! As Kottke mentioned it, it reminds you of the AOL’s closeted neighborhood, doesn’t it?

I am sure we might be seeing many profiles that experience app-creep and become too unwieldy for their own good. But if the user chooses to define their profile that way, more power to them. Just don’t clutter my inbox with invitations that you know I’ll ignore. The beauty of Facebook was in its simplicity and strong networking tools. I supported the move to add the mini-feed especially after they allowed more control over the privacy features and loved the opening up of their API. I guess, all these app flood will peter out once things settle down and ‘frivolous’ ones are weeded out once the charm is lost.

I am not app-shy. I have quite a few on my profile but I have kicked out most in recent times and kept only those that I use on a regular basis. Or the ones that extend my profile. Among the ones I have, my favorites are Flixster, Cities I’ve Visited, CouchSwap, and Neighborhoods.