Let me start this post by saying that I have always been a fan of Facebook and it is the social networking platform that I use the most. However, with the recent addition of Facebook Apps, the quality of the experience has started to decline.

If you are an avid social networking fiend, then you know that MySpace and Facebook are the two biggest networks in the US. Some complaints that are often said about MySpace is that it is too cluttered, not organized, and users receive a lot of spam. Apps, while good in theory, are pushing Facebook in the direction of all the things that are wrong with MySpace.

The Problem

Facebook apps started out as a really cool addition to the network. It is a great thing when companies open up to allow others to develop software on their platform and provide value to their users. When this development is left unchecked, however, the quality of the platform is brought down.

The clean interface of Facebook is now overflowing with apps. Instead of posting on someone’s wall, you now have to navigate through their Advanced Wall, Fun Wall and Graffiti Wall before getting to the regular wall. When you visit a friend’s page, it is often covered with clutter resembling the annoying mess that is most MySpace profiles.

Another issue with apps is the invite procedure. When you add an app, it asks you to tell your friends to join, which makes sense, but sometimes it tricks you or forces you to invite your friends to the group. Then an invitation shows up in your friends notifications saying “CJ wants to test your movie knowledge”. (Not to mention that it is easier to invite people to apps than groups, but I’ll save that for another post.)

At first, it seems as though this is a personal invite to respond to something your friend is doing. After you receive thirty of these a week, sometimes from people you never talk to, you quickly realize that it is just another form of spam. The most annoying part of this is that after you have refused to be a vampire, you still get more invitations from your friends as they add the app.

Not only are these annoying, but they dilute the quality of other notifications such as wall posts, new pictures, pokes, etc. At some point this onslaught of notifications turns the user off from the experience.

So what’s the solution?

1. Facebook can try to ensure that the apps themselves are not just spam in a costume. For example, the What Kind Of Drunk Are You? quiz. Once you take the quiz, you are forced to add your friends in order to receive the results. Not only that, but if you click on the continue button at the bottom, it directs you to some ebay page completely unrelated to Facebook or the app. Not cool.

2. Facebook could organize the apps in a better way. They do have them arranged in categories on the apps page, but once you are in a profile, they are just a mess. One of the things that originally made Facebook easier to navigate than MySpace is that they controlled the design of your page. They should still control the design so that the apps are in one spot or grouped by category.

3. Some of the apps, especially things like Super Wall and Super Poke should be able to be plugins instead of completely separate apps. This allows the added functionality without the clutter.

4. Once you deny an invitation to use an app, you should not keep receiving those invitations from other users.

5. Bottom line: users want quality apps, not thousands of shitty ones.

Conclusion

Hopefully Facebook will acknowledge the issues associated with the applications. There are some that I really enjoy, namely iLike, but most of them are garbage. Let me know in the comments if you have any problems with the apps or possible solutions that I forgot to mention. Also, join my Petition To Stop App Spam group on Facebook to help support the cause.