This weekend, Calacanis and Scoble are dualing on what boils down to a "Fad or the Future" debate. Both continue to write on the topic ignoring the very real fact that the majority of users of the service don't have anything like the same experience as theirs, by virtue of most of us not being Internet famous.
I'm falling on the "Fad" side. Far from an early adopter, I've been using Facebook for just a few months, but it has changed beyond recognition in that time. Signal to noise is definitely becoming annoyingly skewed, and it's due to these new applications!
Let's for brevity ignore so many applications being valueless, and that these tend to be the type that even mostly well-meaning people choose to propagate. In fact, let's not ignore that. People are happy to send Zombie invites to masses of people - it's harmless fun. They actually seem less willing to invite friends to well thought out and dare I say, useful applications, perhaps for fear of being geek-labeled?
Back to the point. I'm invited into these pockets of activity with little idea of what to expect from them. Today I agreed to a quick quiz that a friend had invited me to take. After the quiz, the normal "who to invite" screen appeared. After deselecting-all (which should really be a one-click operation, or better yet the default), the experience ends with one more button offering to assist me with inviting more friends, and that, as they say, is it. I have absolutely no idea what I gained from taking this quiz. Had I known I wouldn't even get some kind of analysis, I wouldn't have bothered. Waste of my time!
Not long ago it appeared that Facebook may end up being ruined by a ramping up of the ad. model, but before this has even become an issue it's being ruined by these applications. The only intent of many of these applications appears to be to spread virally, gain a large userbase, then perhaps then try to find a quick way to make some money on each user.
It's boring, it's transparent (the bad kind) and it's getting in the way of the presentation of the interesting data about people I know. Today, what I assume is Facebook themselves are polling users on the usefulness of the invite process for the applications. At the time of voting, the "No's" have it. What they choose to do with this information might be interesting, and hopefully piss off the whining application spawners who feel entitled (wrongly) to their viral marketing tool that is Facebook.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment