Iain’s Blog

Once again Facebook demonstrate their finesse by kicking off a high profile blogger. In this case I agree that it’s not the “kicking off” which is the problem - the naming of this account was quite clearly in contravention of their rules - but rather the heavy handed and abrupt method in which they pulled the plug. No warning - just gone!

In a recent Scoble interview with Mark Zuckerberg he expressed the desire to encourage new applications which are less useless (my words not his!) and more functional. But why would anyone trust their data to a company who can restrict your access to your own data, and kill you off without so much as a sniff!

As it stands I wouldn’t be all that bothered if I wasn’t able to poke someone with a carrot - or throw a wardrobe at them! But if I was using this platform for anything other than total trivia I would be starting to get concerned ….

Julie Zhuo from Facebook says,

As time has gone on, we’ve received increased complaints from users that friends’ profiles are getting too cluttered, and that people are having trouble finding the information they are looking for on their friends’ profiles. On the other side, users are complaining that their own profiles are cluttered, and they have installed so many applications that it has become overwhelming to un-clutter it.

There has been lots of hype about the Facebook development platform and how it opens up the social networking sphere etc etc. Is not the real problem that we have a myriad of 3rd party applications almost all of which are completely useless and which provide nothing more than a transient moment of entertainment for the user?

Are there any 3rd party applications that actually do something worthwhile?? To be fair, I have come across a few .. but not many!

Another question is this - as a developer how can I hope to get a revenue stream from development of a facebook app? Perhaps by answering that question we can answer the first. On the other hand it doesn’t seem clear how Facebook themselves hope to generate revenue anywhere near what would be required to justify their recent valuation - so what hope is there for the 3rd parties?

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/154359/facebook-applications-clutter-site.html