Facebook sux

I agree with this guy:

You've been marketed to!

Though, of course, the thing I like least about Facebook is not the commercialism. That I expect. Even the increasing garishness and intrusiveness of the ads doesn't bother me as much as the thing I hate the most. That thing I so hate is the whole collection of incredibly stupid 'applications.'

For those who don't use Facebook, and those who just like to have things explained to them, an 'application' is a little php program that a Facebook user can subscribe to and become a user of. The user then usually receives some kind of applet to embed in his Facebook profile which he and other users of the 'application' can use to do whatever it is that the application was written for them to do.

Not all applications are annoying. Some are provided by Facebook itself. Most notable is the 'Wall' application which allow users to communicate simply by writing comments on each other's profiles. There are others provided by third parties that are also useful, such as the 'What I'm Listening To' application which uses my Last.fm profile to display the music I listen to on my profile page. Also, a number of political applications as well.

A few goo exceptions aside however, the vast majority of Facebook 'applications' are trivial, annoying, ugly, and viral. My least favorite are the ones that are simply rehashes of things that Facebook already provides. For example, all those variants of the 'Poke', such as 'SuperPoke', 'X me', etc. Not only so these provide merely trivial and mostly irritating 'improvements' on the original, they also fail to supersede it in any meaningful way. You can't really get rid of the original and the new one can't be used with the old at all. So what you end up with are two, nearly identical, confusing, 'applications,' taking up space on one's profile. Then some decides to pick up twelve of these and you have no idea how they want to be contacted.

About as bad are the zombie/vampire/xmonster apps which do nothing but score you based on how many other chumps you can get to take up the same app. So, they're like tacky ugly pyramid schemes that people, for some reason, choose to join with no promise of getting rich. Similar, are the quiz games that automatically invite all of your 'friends' to take the same quiz and attempt to beat you. Of course, to do this you have to 'join,' and give away all of your private info, which is probably the worst thing about all of this. Any asshole with a passing knowledge of PHP can coax literally thousands of suburban college and highschool kids into giving away their private info for next to nothing. It's telemarketer/spamer's wet-dream, and it's amazing they can get away with it.

Not that Facebook is without its uses. It's certainly more efficient than the amalgam of blogs, message boards, email accounts, and instant messengers that we would use other wise. It certainly makes it easier to find and keep in contact with friends and acquaintances. But the concept of the place just feels like so much bullshit that I sometimes wonder whether it is worth it. Seriously.