why facebook might be consigning themselves to the slushpile of history.

I’m with you Hugh. I’ve actually written friends and said: please do not check all friends.. and specifically unchoose me from any of these apps.
Doesn’t work.
Now it seems like I only go to Facebook because I like the way you can play scrabulous from their page. I ignore almost everything else. Seriously thinking that I don’t need Facebook anymore.

The *only* thing Facebook is good at is being viral.

LOL … Great point. I mostly let those invitations pile up on the side for days until I can’t take it anymore. Why not offer a bulk management system, where I can delete or accept them all at once?
There could even be a filtering system, where you would only get invites to business apps, or from certain friends only. You could group your friends into those you want to get invites from and those you don’t. In fact there’s a whole bunch of ways they could make it easier for us to manage this never-ending slab of BACN on our sidebar!
I’m guessing they want to put all apps on an even footing so that you’ll get invites to those things that do interest you, as well as the zombie hugs that don’t.

See, this is MySpace all over again, who puffed up their statistics by requiring a lot of page views. Only with Facebook, it’s interacting with apps. The thing is, Hugh, I joined FB when I saw it got your endorsement. This sudden about-face of yours is rather surprising, especially since the “zombie invite problem” has been around for a long time on FB. What’s next?

Agreed. I went to facebook and visited everyday because it was less annoying than Myspace and all the dumb chain letters and bulletins people post– and I think you make a great point about it looking like they’re just exploding pageviews– It’s becoming annoying now to deny the 20+ app invites I get everyday and now it’s just another annoying social networking site to me when it could have been something great.
I might move my stuff over to utterz now.

I think you have to remember that a lot of people are still working Facebook out. We didn’t witness people learning the web for the first time, but with FB we kind of have to. I think it’ll go like this:
1. For a while people will entertain themselves with zombie stuff
2. Then they’ll start looking for more interesting uses of the social graph and a few apps (think sharing useful data with friends, dating, etc.) will start to get traction
3. There on out, app developers will stop cutting their teeth on toy apps and start innovating
It’s going to be painful to get there, but it will happen, and it won’t just be Facebook: it’ll be cross-site so you might be in FB whilst I’m in MySpace or whatever (thanks to the open API efforts of several players, that FB will have to sign up to eventually).
Think back to how bad the web was in the early days. Think how it matured and we started getting useful things out of it eventually.
We’re very early on in the arch of developing social networking applications, but it won’t take 1/10th the time it took for the web to mature.

Anybody remember Friendster?
The douchebags got ahold of it so everybody jumped to MySpace. Then along come the douchebags again and its all “Facebook is the greatest man.” Guess who’s back? If you didn’t answer “the douchebags,” you need to return your computer to the Apple store.

One of the problems for said junior coder is defining ‘annoying’, of course. Facebook doesn’t have a system of rating application developers or applications that I’ve seen and until that happens, how does the code underneath the tick-box decide whether to show you an invitation or not?
My partner puts Scrabulous into the ‘really annoying’ category, mainly because half her office are working their fingers to the bone and the others are playing Scrabble. How does Facebook differentiate between her and Debra above?

This is so damn right and it is just about to backlash,
Some blogger described it as fram – spam from friends.
For me it is the the big scam of facebook – it’s forced virality and not genuine.
A.

Oh.. and interestingly enough… Jean Baudrillard’s last entry in The intelligence of evil advocates creating rules and illusion to combat ‘virtual reality’. Hahahha… So keep on making some Hugh laws.

at least no one can argue thatfacebook being operates as “walled garden” 😉
anyway that’s on the table at the moment. changing term wall (of “walled garden”) to “firewall”.

Spit n suck, open API´s and OWN your own data by creating your own social network (a´la ning or peopleaggregator). Bcause the current status and trend is just silly.

Lots of people are getting sick of the spam. THere’s a group that’s been started that is solely for the purpose of getting people to list what they feel are the most annoying apps. The group creators then post a link to where users can block each app.
It’s not much, but it’s a start.

The problem with Facebook is not that some of us are tired of it and only spend hours in there to clean up invites to weird/ useless apps.
The problem with Facebook is that the vast majority of users (mostly everyone I know) does use the same hours to spam the few of us.
It’s my guess that their usage figures are more correct than I’d like to admit.
Another guess is that in order for the situation to change there has to come something new, with the potential to replace Facebook, so the users can migrate.
We could also dream that a lot of people suddenly write blogs (instead of publishing photos and status messages), get challenging jobs (it’s mainly at work that they spam us), and generally get social in real life.
As the latter suggestions are far fetched, what stops any of us tired and upset ones to delete our profile? What do we get out of Facebook to justify staying there?

It was fun for a while. I’m moving on. Surely such is the nature of temporary/internet things. Not everyone can contain themselves and be elegant online.
Less is more. Facebook does too much; like a flashy mobile (yes I mean iPhone) usually you just want to call people with it, the rest is often superfluous.

I’ve complained to a friend that she actively invited me to SuperWall, Zombie, Glitter and she said she did no such thing. Is Facebook sending out automated add-to-apps that neither friend knows about?

Looks like FB is starting to feel the heat on this topic already.
Not sure how far they’re going to “reign themselves in,” but it’s a start.