Facebook offers me irritating little choices, almost every day. I have a system for dealing with them.
Friend Requests · If I know you, sure thing, unless I really dislike you. If you work for Sun and we’ve ever interacted at all, that’s good enough. If I don’t recognize the name or the face, I do a big search through all my email to see if I’ve ever heard from you. If not, then not. If so, then I decide whether we actually had a friendly interaction, in which case yes, or you just sent me a note about about something, in which case no, unless either the subject or the note itself was really cool.
Applications · I’m forever getting prompted to “answer a question” or some other thing that involves adopting a Facebook Application. Nope; my experience with FB apps has been sufficiently miserable that if you want me to load one, you need to send a personal you-to-Tim note explaining what this thing does and why it’s worthwhile.
Contributions
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Asbjørn Ulsberg (Aug 14 2007, at 00:13)
I've found that 100% of all "add this application" requests are infact spam that the sender either aren't aware of that he sent, or sent in mere error by not removing one or more checkboxes when installing the application in his or her own profile. "Super Wall", "My Questions", etc., are all examples of this.
I added "My Questions" the other day and for some weird reason I had a question posted automatically on my profile that somehow reached one of my friends which answered it without my knowledge. I thought the "Bob has asked you a question" invitations was in fact concious invitations and questions postes by Bob, but it seems that most of them are just automatically generated, posted to your profile and at the same time spammed to all of your friend as if you're asking them the question directly. The question "My Questions" posted to my profile was "How was your first kiss" which I would never dream of asking anyone.
I'm ignoring more and more application requests and are increasingly hoping for an option to turn them off permanently. If someone wants me to add an application, they can ask so themselves, they don't need help from the application to do it.
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From: Phillip Fayers (Aug 14 2007, at 01:25)
I think that Facebook's applications have the potential to be its downfall. The system became popular because it was simple and the applications confuse that simplicity.
Another problem they need to fix is the "Friend" issue. Given how late Facebook came to the game they should have learned from people like Flickr and given the option of "Contact" or some such in addition to Friend.
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From: Andrew (Aug 14 2007, at 06:05)
I think Asbjørn Ulsberg's got it right - that has been my application experience as well. Now I've found it a good idea to mark almost all notifications as spam and not have to deal with them. I'd like there to be a blanket way to do that (right now, once you get a certain kind of notification, you can mark that as spam - the one I just did today was "booze-mail" which sounds ludicrously stupid or incredibly ingenious, but didn't have enough of a hook for me to try to find out).
At the moment I've only got a few applications, because I found them to be very cool. One of them I think you have - "Where I've been," an interesting little app that has a nifty little UI - and the other you might like as well, if you're a scrabble sort of person. It's call "Scrabulous" and you can play free Scrabble games with up to 3 people. I'm pretty sure it's monetized by ads, though.
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From: Eugene (Aug 14 2007, at 09:24)
Kinda off-topic. Maybe you should have titled this post "My Facebook Rules" or "Rules for Facebook." At first glance, I thought that you were praising Facebook. :)
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