Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Disclaimer—I used to be a Facebook junkie & an uber-fan.

I have come across this video (below), which offers a really cheesy way of asking the $15 billion question, “Are you sick of Facebook?”.

As per my disclaimer, I used to be a huge fan of the site. I think Facebook is a great way to connect friends, find new people/connections, and even have a bit of a personalized page for the non-savvy web user without it starting to look like a MySpace page (sorry MySpace, but your pages look like crap). So where did it go wrong? Applications, my mess of a News Feed, and the FB team trying to do everything.

In theory applications, area fantastic idea.  They allow the average user to customize their profile that much more: adding games, more flexible features (Super Poke), tools (Tripadvisor Cities I have Visited), and allowing you to show loyalty to causes/brands/and more. Where things started to go haywire was with the addition of crap. What do I mean by crap? How about my list of 45 current notifications alerting me of my invites. These include guesses about my favorite teams, zombies, political stances, what iLike, comparisons, stock exchanges, well you get the point. Not to mention that while I know the people who have invited me, none of them are my good friends. This leads to the first question/suggestion:

Why does Facebook allow application invites to be spammed to all of your “friends”?

Not only do I get tons of application requests but my homepage looks more like a garbage dump than a news feed. The FB team will say that the News Feed is the most valuable area of the site and many resources are being dedicated to improve the algorithm that determines what shows up. There have been some improvements to the feed, such as the X and the Thumbs Up, to help filter content, but these are such harsh solutions. While I don’t need every single Mahalo update from Jason Calacanis, I would like to see one or two from time to time—so it doesn’t deserve a Thumbs Up or an X. Question/suggestion number two:

Why won’t Facebook allow me to customize my feed into groups/widgets (good friends, application updates, extended friends, relationship changes, etc.?

Finally, why does Facebook have to do everything? I completely understand the need for businesses to grow, expand, improve but was the FB approach really the right way? Why spend time/money on adding application before adding users? Yup first they expanded to HS, then businesses, and then to anyone but then what? Multiple languages have just begun to trickle in and we can be sure that are are on their way—moving Facebook to a truly global community. Fantastic, you can now control the world’s social community, to me that is a goal, not adding applications. People were very happy, and addicted, during the PA days (pre-application) days. Question number three:

How do you plan to re-addict people to Facebook now that the platform has been spread so thin?

Will 2008 be a hard year for Facebook? There are still 10 months left for Mark and team to save the ship or for the user base to move along, just like they did from Friendster to Dodgeball to MySpace and now for the time being, Facebook.