Is Facebook Walking a Dangerous Line?
As much as I am a huge fan of facebook in so many different ways including the fact that they provide a cleaner layout than MySpace, require less clicks and page-refreshes than myspace using AJAX, and the fact that they provide an extensible API, some of the recent movies made me frown a little bit.
There are too many god damned applications coming up and there’s way too much stuff on some people’s profiles than there should be. On some of my friends’ profiles, I need to scroll down for quite a bit until I can reach the wall section to write something there. Also some of the applications leave useless updates in the newsfeeds, which means relevant newsfeeds are being pushed back way too faster than it should be. If I don’t log in often I’ll miss even more than I used to.
On the upside, the application boxes adhere strictly to the standards of the Facebook design which means that the look is at least uniform. But nonetheless, I find that it is becoming annoying and too complicated (which is precisely why I never got into MySpace). Of course, it’s still a hundred times cleaner than MySpace could ever be.
Another source of irritation is that there are some applications that are very similar to each other which causes an overlap. As far as facebook users are concerned, this is not a marketplace of competition, but a website for convenient contact with friends and associates. I quite frankly do not care to install both the TravelBuddy Visited Countries as well as the Cities I’ve Visited application (OK, if I hadn’t been so well traveled I wouldn’t have, but since I wanted to show off I added them both anyways).
The applications should be better filtered based on usability and also in consideration of other existing applications. And perhaps imposing a limit on how many applications one user can have would be a good idea to keep things clean as well.
What’s everybody else’s take on this?
I hate the excessive amount of applications too.
I like that facebook allows us to hide applications that we dont care for. I myself have only ever installed one unofficial application …
Facebook added little icons underneath your profile picture to access things like the wall with on click, but they are so damned ugly I (display:none’d) them using stylish .. as well as any other minor change that I didn’t like
damn this is a nice design. the header is transparent. wow you’ve out done yourself jeff.
Hi Jeff, facebook is so flexible until I couldn’t really understand initially how it worked… before, i have been using friendster… And when i leave a comment, i actually write a TESTIMONY! haha.. my friend told me this is just a wall to scibble!
I think that is a fair assessment and totally agree.
I completely agree with you as well. I hope they are (facebook) thinking about implementing some type of filtering for the new applications. There is a great amount of new applications that is created daily and that number will grow exponentially unless they do something about it.
I agree with you. It’s getting more complicated. It’s bad for new user and it’s definite great for advance user. Either way, it’s shouldn’t get into the way to hang out with your friends there.