Michael Koby

It seems that Facebook applications are becoming the bane of a Facebook user’s existence.  At least on Facebook anyway.  Since Facebook announced their API hundreds of applications have been developed for the Facebook platform and several hundred are used on peoples profiles daily.

There is an application for everything.  You can find out “What Your Love Language Is” or you can join the new generation of Oregon Trail.  If neither of those suit you, you can “Super Poke” your friends or even have Twitter update your status.  Want to play Scrabble, they even have you covered there.  Point is, there are a lot of Facebook applications.

For every person that installs a ton of Facebook applications, there are those that find the idea of a bunch of applications messing up their profile to be horrendous at best.  There are people who complain regularly about the many applications that dominate Facebook profiles.  It really is an “either/or” kind of game out there with regards to Facebook Applications.

So what is it exactly about these applications that have some Facebook users up in arms?  It could be one of two issues depending on who you ask.  The less vocal bunch are those that do not like looking at profiles that have a ton of applications on them.  They find these applications distracting from the social aspect of Facebook.  Most of the folks in this lot tend to just deal with it and move on.  The other group however make blog posts, posts on the “Wall” of their Facebook friends, and are extremely vocal about their hatred for Facebook applications.  Why?  Because a lot of these applications require you to “invite” friends to join in and install the application.  In several cases you can’t see certain things unless you are also using the specified application.  Sure, Facebook is a social website and some aspects of it can not be enjoyed unless you have friends participating, but should applications require you to invite others in order to install the application?

Basically Facebook applications are new kind of spam in their own right.  I myself have received countless “invites” to certain applications with a note attached from the user inviting me that says something like “You can ignore, I had to invite all my friends to move to the next level” or something similar.  Annoying? You bet.  I however, do not have a ton of friends and so I don’t see this as much as those that have thousands of “friends” (can you really have thousands of “friends”?).

However there is reverse side to this issue.  The fact that the development API that allows programmers to create these applications exists is something of an achievement.  It is something that gave Facebook a nice edge over MySpace (until MySpace joined OpenSocial).  The ability to develop on a social network allowed for some new kinds of applications and nifty innovation.  So while it has created the new “social network spam” it has created a network of applications that run on a social platform.  And not all applications are spammy.  Some of them even make sense (like the BlackBerry PIN Exchnage app).

I think that if we can move away from having to invite our friends when we install and use applications it won’t be so bad and people will be less angry over the issue.  It is going to take time however because most people view the idea of a social application having to be overly social.  We need control over how much social we want in our applications.

There was an interesting article (Youngsters Not Happy Oldies Going Online) about the younger folk not really liking the fact that the older crowd is online, using social networks, and most importantly (to the youngsters anyway) sending them friend requests. The article mainly focuses on the younger people who use MySpace and Facebook to talk about and show photos of their elicit activities, not really wanting to accept their parents friend request on either social network. The article goes into several examples of students accepting their parents and some not because “its not cool” but it also points out parents might want to back off. The article does a fairly decent job of not saying what is right or wrong and how these younger folk should respond, but I think it completely ignores a point that shows why more of the older generation is getting online.

Let us look at this a little more closely. I have been on computers since I was 5 years old. I really got into them at 15. Between the ages of 5 and 15, I really just used the computer to play games and write documents. When I turned 15 and Compuserve got access to the world wide web (WWW), I was completely hooked. These days I work as an IT consultant, doing programming, setting up servers and databases, and doing assessments for my clients. So I stuck with it. The generation before mine, saw computers as nothing more than tools, sure some saw them as fun and hackable, but the population at large only really used them for writing stuff, performing calculations, and so forth. As their children got older and were surrounded by technology they became the computer using folk they are today. However, just like me, they are close to or right at 30 years of age now. Chances are that these former children have children of their own. So what does a generation of computer users do as they get older? They continue to use computers. Some move on and only use computers for games, documents, and the occasional media (music or movies). Several of them though, made careers out of the little boxes with screens and are up on the latest and greatest in computers, including social networks, hot websites, and even Linux.

What does that all mean to the generation after mine? Well, it means that when my daughter gets old enough to have a computer in her room with internet access, she’ll know that “daddy” plays on computers too. Will that mean that she won’t go onto the social networks, post incriminating photos of herself doing the things that teenagers and new college students do? Probably not, in fact she’ll probably do it before most of her friends. Does that mean I’m going to spy on her MySpace just to make sure? Not really. But the kids today have to realize that it was those adults they are so weirded out by that made the internet what it is today. It is because of those adults that the internet became more than just a fad, it became a tool. The natural momentum just means that we kept up with it all. Not everyone mind you but a good number of us. I’m 28 now and have been using the internet in some form for around 14 years. I had BBS (bulletin board system) accounts where I talked to others in my city and from around the country on a nightly basis. It was through them I learned about IRC (Internet Relay Chat), that was before I got on Compuserve and discovered the big WWW. For me this is all a progression of what I have been doing since I was a teenager myself. Will my daughter understand that? More than likely. Will she like it that daddy knows more about computers than she does? Probably not.

I think that most kids these days and those that are on their way to being teenagers in the next 8-10 years should realize now that mommy and daddy know about and use the internet quite frequently. In fact, several parents are going to be quite adept at using the internet, and really you just need to deal. We will be on your social networks, we’ll be on your IM list, and we’ll Twitter you when you’re out on your first date. That just comes with the territory of being a part of the generation to come after mine.

Matt Wood, over at 43 folders, wrote an article entitled, Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments.

I just finished reading the article and he makes several interesting points.  Earlier this year I suffered massive burn out from work, blogging, online reading, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace,  and even my radio show.  I replaced my job with a better one.  But it caused me to burn out faster on the rest of my online activities and even my radio show started to become routine.

The end result was I ended up stopping the regular updates on my blog, cut MySpace mainly out of my life, and even stopped Twittering (even though at the time I wasn’t doing it that much).  Derek (the host of the radio show) and I even started making changes to the format of our radio show and even added a new co-host.  Things have been looking up recently in the way of my online world. Read more »