Stuart Ford I speak my mind involuntarily. It's both a blessing and a curse.

Facebook’s wretched application platform

During 2007, Facebook released an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows third party developers to create "applications" that run within Facebook, accessible by Facebook users and that have the ability to interact with Facebook accounts. Unfortunately, in contrast to Apple's iPhone App Store, Facebook place little restriction on what sort of application can be developed and they care even less about the quality of such applications. As a result, these days the average Facebook "news feed" is a cluttered malaise of lame and pointless messages from third party applications that Facebook users have added to their profiles. It was quite simply the worst decision Facebook have ever made and remains so to this day, in my opinion.

I now as a matter of course hide these applications whenever they appear in my news feed, because they are almost 100% of the time always absolute garbage. It's come to my attention recently that I now have quite an extensive list of applications in my "hide list", just one short of a hundred in fact:

1. All About Me
2. Are You A Top Or Bottom?
3. Are You Gay?
4. Are you just ONE in a 1 MILLION?
5. Bejeweled Blitz
6. Bouncing Balls
7. Daily Horoscope
8. FarmVille
9. Friends For Sale!
10. Gem Blitz
11. Get To Know Me
12. Hottest Person Contest
13. How average is my life?
14. How Big is your Penis?
15. How Common is your name?
16. How Dateable are you
17. How Dirty is your mind?
18. How girly are you?
19. How Good Are U At Gay Sex
20. How good are YOU in bed?
21. How good is your Grammar?
22. How good is your medical knowledge?
23. How Jewish are You?
24. How long would you survive in the ghetto?
25. How many Sex Partners will you have?
26. How MEAN are you?
27. How Retarded are You?
28. How Sexy are you?
29. How Sexy is your Zodiac Sign?
30. How will you DIE!?
31. If you're single, take this quiz.
32. iHeart
33. Jewel Puzzle
34. Know-It-All Trivia
35. Likeness
36. LivingSocial
37. Lollipop
38. Meaning Behind Your Name!
39. MindJolt Games
40. My Aquarium
41. My Polls
42. Nicest Person Contest
43. Plastic, Nerd, Jock, Emo, Loner, Popular, or Normal?
44. Polls
45. Reign of Vampires
46. Roller Coaster Kingdom
47. Send Your Friends a HAPPY THOUGHT!
48. Send Your Friends a Slap on the butt!
49. Sorority Sisters
50. Super Slot Machines
51. Superhero City
52. Tango Head Masher 3000
53. Tattoodle
54. Test your english
55. Texas HoldEm Poker
56. THE INNER NATIONALITY QUIZ: WHAT ARE YOU REALLY?
57. The London Underground Test
58. The Official Michael Jackson Quiz
59. What "Periodic Element" are you?
60. What % Gay are you?
61. What animal is your spirit guide?
62. what coulor looks good on u?
63. What do Your Eyes Say About You?
64. What does your Eye Color reveal about you?
65. What Era Should You Time Travel To?
66. What is the name of the man you'll marry?
67. What is your Dream House?
68. What is your patronus?
69. What Kind of Gay Are you?
70. What kind of heart are you?
71. What Michael Jackson Song are You?
72. what part of manchester are YOU really from?
73. What Psychiatric Disorder do you have?
74. What role will you play in the Apocalypse?
75. What Tattoo Should You Get?
76. What type of Flight Attendant are you?
77. What type of gay are you?
78. What will your Son's name be?
79. What's Your Best Quality?
80. What's your geek level?
81. What's your Maturity Level?
82. What's your old lady name?
83. What's your true choir personality?
84. Where in Stockport are you from?
85. Which 'Prisoner Cell Block H' character are you?
86. Which "Spaced" character are you?
87. Which Airline are you?
88. Which color is your aura?
89. Which Friends Character are you?
90. Which Gilligan's Island Character are you?
91. Which Muppet are you?
92. Which of your Chakras is most open?
93. which part of Salford are you from? INIT
94. Which Tube line are you?
95. Who is your lifetime match?
96. who loves you?
97. Who would be your celebrity boyfriend?
98. You're sooo Good Looking
99. Your Tarot Card Reading

This list in all likelihood represents only a tiny fraction of all the lame applications available on Facebook. They're just not necessary, any of them.

For comparison, I only use two applications (in addition to the standard Facebook applications such as Photos, Video, etc):

1. Twitter - allows me to update my Facebook status via Twitter
2. Friendwheel - generates a visual representation of the links between you and your friends, but without posting garbage to your wall (and thus other peoples' news feeds).

That's it, and I could easily live without the second one. The first one is however genuinely useful and to not use it would simply create more work for me updating social networking sites.

The madness has to stop some day.

Update 14/09/2009: It would seem that Facebook are finally listening with the launch of Facebook Lite, a version of Facebook designed for slower computers and low bandwidth Internet connections. One of its best features is that it does not include Facebook applications anywhere. You cannot access them and they do not show up in the news feed. Result! Now all that's needed is to have that as an option on the full version of the site. Also, my list of hidden applications is now over 120 long.