Facebook Exploitation

It's pure exploitation. It's encouraged, to an extent, and supported, to a similar extent, but nonetheless, Facebook's application platform is all about exploitation.

It keeps circling around. At first it was a good communication platform, then apps arrived and it became cluttered with crap. Soon they tightened up things to the point where it was difficult for applications an individual user hadn't approved to appear in that user's feed.

Then they redesigned. For a few weeks it was fine. The news feed had essentially turned into the status updates page. A few weeks later, suddenly my news feed is full of bullshit I don't want to see.

What's the difference? Simple. The users themselves are now being exploited into posting application updates. The App makers achieve the same level of disruption that they were first able to around a year ago. They must think it's Christmas, or at least early 2008.

Flavour of the week - inane quizzes and top five lists.

What control does Facebook give us? We can either hide the user, or hide the application. This is somewhat useful, but these very similar looking posts are coming from many different applications. Once again i'm crap cleaning rather than just taking in the information, and given that spam has shot up ridiculously in the last few months I have enough of that to do when checking email to ensure something genuine or important isn't buried in there. Same applies.

Next problem - if one of these updates originates from one of the few applications I actually want to remain installed against my name? Two in particular being iLike (now just called Music) and Movies. If I hide them i'm hiding them forever I suppose, just because I don't like the one time disturbance.

The problem distilled - exploit the user, asking them to agree to post an update in their name from their application. The blame is clearly shared, but I have to pick either the user or the app to react against. I can't really blame the users as they are being conned. It's the "invite everyone" thing all over again. They don't know they're annoying their friends, they just click the big button.

Blame the app, but blame Facebook too for not implicitly assuming that app makers will continually exploit every user they can draw the eyeballs of in an attempt at viral growth for, as per usual, eyeballs on ads.

No doubt in two to three weeks this will be sorted out, but why let it happen in the first place and ruin the user experience. Facebook - you're not invincible. Can't you feel a shift coming?