Web 28 Jun 2007 09:21 am
Open Book
It wasn’t too long ago that Facebook was the place to go when you were tired of the noisy, ad-laden social networking found elsewhere on the web, most notably the platform’s biggest competitor, MySpace. Facebook was meant to be…well, a facebook—a place where students from a college could interact with and get to know one another. But in the age of venture capitalism and billion-dollar site acquisitions, it was only a matter of time before Facebook turned itself into a moneymaking juggernaut, disregarding the very intentions under which the site was first created.
I speak not of the fact that Facebook opened its doors to all users of the Internet in September 2006. That was a necessary step in drawing users away from MySpace. The beginning of Facebook’s descent into obnoxiousness began this past May, when the site opened itself up to developers interested in creating applications for the site. Applied with some sort of quality control, this step could have been a useful evolution to Facebook. But, browsing through the 47 pages of applications, it becomes obvious that there’s no lighthouse keeper to direct these applications into the port.
There are at least three applications that enhance your ability to “poke” someone – SuperPoke, Poke Pro, and X Me. Want to share more of you musical taste than just writing your favorite bands into your profile? There are 72 applications that either play music on your profile, track the songs you listen to on iTunes, or alert you to concerts in your area featuring your favorite groups. There are dozens of applications that assign an emoticon to your mood. If you need to do something on Facebook, rest assured that there are a vast number of different options to accomplish it.
Opening Facebook up for more customization isn’t a bad thing, but the unsupervised creation of new applications only presents the chance that profiles will become littered with useless garbage. Next up: organizations and phony porn stars are creating profiles and spamming your inbox. I can’t wait.
[/rant]
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Run Fatboy Run
Matt Nathanson - Some Mad Hope
They Might Be Giants - The Else
J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
on 29 Jun 2007 at 1:03 am 1.Chaz Meyers said …
I think a quote from Ze Frank re: MySpace applies here:
“In Myspace, millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that “work” in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool.”
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071406.html
I hate tackiness as much as the next person. Much of MySpace reminds me too much of the frumpy AOL homepage I made in 1997, to the point where it’s a bit too close to home to watch.
Like you, I valued the cleanness that Facebook has had up to this point. However, while the Facebook Platform shows the potential to introduce “ugly”, it also shows the potential for thousands of developers to expand Facebook in directions the creators never contemplated.
Is there too much duplication right now? Certainly. You don’t need 5 different Poke apps, especially since if you have to add the poke app when you get poked. Each social networking app has always been a “walled garden” of sorts. Now Facebook has made itself to be a big walled garden with as many walled gardens on the inside as there are apps. I admit this is not a good thing.
However, to only let apps trickle in as they are approved by paid staff would kill people’s interest in making programs for the Facebook platform.
on 30 Jun 2007 at 3:06 am 2.heapy said …
yeah, i agree with chaz. as soon as developers realize there are too damn many poking apps out there, they’ll stop making them, leaving room for people who can be truly innovative.
myspace is a joke full of phony coders who only care about their dirty money. everything interesting that they do is funded by stupid movies. myspace is just one big advertisement.
anyway, the only way fake porn stars will add you on myspace is if you’re looking at those sites to begin with. they read your myspace cookie. it’s a very simple tactic.
delete your cookies the next time you get the urge, man :-p
on 30 Jun 2007 at 9:02 am 3.Jeff Martin said …
Chaz: “However, to only let apps trickle in as they are approved by paid staff would kill people’s interest in making programs for the Facebook platform.”
I’m not sure that’s true…I think a lot of people would jump at the chance to “exclusively partner” with Facebook to make the only app of its kind.
heapy: Not sure if I agree with you assessment of how the spammers get to your myspace account. The true answer is to properly restrict how people are able to add you and send you messages.
on 02 Jul 2007 at 1:08 am 4.heapy said …
Don’t agree with my assessment?
Alright, like Burger King: have it your way.
It’s just that it would be easy to read someone’s myspace cookie, which contains their “friend id”, store it in a database, and then run a nightly perl script to plug the thousands of friend ids into myspace’s generic URLs.
They’ve been doing the same thing with e-mail addresses for years. Reading an amazon or ebay cookie. Until amazon and ebay got smart enough to stop storing peoples’ e-mails in the cookies. Myspace’s developers are just morons.
Where do you think all those “enlarge your member” e-mails come from? Why is it that I don’t know very many women who get those?