When people started discovering Facebook, it was a such a refreshing change to MySpace, with more to do, and less pointless spam inhibiting the experience. Unfortunately, it seems that Facebook has now caught up with its rival, and is just as spammy and annoying.

I was a big fan of Facebook for a few months, singing its praises to all and sundry, even writing an article here on BLORGE explaining why its far superior to MySpace. I even cited applications as an area in which Facebook won convincingly over its rival.

While I’m still a member, I only sign in every few days now, compared to the almost religious ritual of a daily visit to the site which I was following a few months ago.

There’s two main reasons for this change in my social networking habits: the first being the dreaded application spam which now seems to be ruining the once glorious Facebook.

Applications were always there of course, but over the last few months the amount of them and how vacuous they are, has seemed to increase at a stupid rate until I no longer want to sign in to my profile for fear of how many invitations to pointless quizzes and games I will have received.

Some of the apps are good, such as the massively popular Scrabulous game. Kind of ironic then that that’s under threat of legal action from Hasbro for being too close in nature to Scrabble.

Some of the others are ridiculous, such as quizzes dedicated to celebrities and TV shows, pirates and zombies, what colour are you, and all sorts of other crap that I really don’t want to be involved with.

Okay, so no-one is forcing me to play along, but friends invite you nonetheless, as if they want to participate they usually get forced to invite 20 of their friends to see their results or add to the app to their profile.While Facebook is trying to stop this from happening, I’m still experiencing it every time I log in.

The other reason my Facebook use has dropped of late is that I’m bored of it. Plain and simply, the novelty has run its course. I’ve added pretty much everyone I wanted to, have shared a few pictures, caught up on old times, and played a few games, and then that’s it… what next?

This video, despite being a blatant attempt at going viral (which I’m helping), sums up my feelings perfectly. Although it isn’t as good as the original Bubble Song which used the same Billy Joel song, it says what needs to be said.

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Entry was posted on Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 at 3:22 pm under Internet, Opinion, Spam, Web2.0.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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