Who does not know about Facebook ? The social networking website originally designed to keep in touch with ones ex-colleagues now accelerating blindly on the path of inevitable doom. Not financial doom, but the pit where every single social network website eventually ends up in. I am talking about degeneration to the level where friends list is not an actual list of friends but rather a list of about 50% of the whole community with whom one actually does not communicate let alone occasional "spanking" (if you use Facebook you know what I mean).

I have started using Facebook quite late, in summer of 2007 out of curiosity that was stirred by aesthetic simplicity that the site radiated (yes, some may laugh now but I had no idea about third-party application back then). It looked so much better than MySpace monstrosity with custom CSS styles that almost everywhere results in some obscure transparency/giant-JPEG-image-background combination that literally devours ones web browser (not to mention ones eyes). And, so I have decided, I use the site according to its original purpose - to stay in touch with friends from all the schools from my path to the summit of intellectual elite (sounds a bit snobbish, I know, but it is just so poetic ;) ). I rarely accept anyone else than the people I know and everything works just fine that way.

But recently I have noticed some weird and worrying trends going on. Facebook enables third party applications that offer all kinds of additional (more or less useless) functionality. Now, put aside the questionable privacy aspects, those applications can be really annoying. Some even require to spam your friends with requests just to use them. A matter of choice of course.

And then you have some applications that require to send the mails only to friends with certain characteristic if you want to use them. Different attributes can be listed here, for example "Best friend" or "cute". Now the problem is if you don't have enough best friends (even the phrase is a kind of oxymoron because only one friend can be the best !?) or cute friends ... well you cannot use the application. Not to be idiotic enough an application today asked me to send the request to 15 of my friends that I consider cute but omitting the top 10 people (girls) that were already ranked. Needless to say that left me more or less guys on the list. So what do in the occasion like this: a) just pick random people from the list ... not really my style as I like to tell only what I think, b) find 15 new "friends" ... heck, that would really not be that hard but it would be totally against my principles ... and c) delete the application ... easy but the annoying requests still remain.

Conclusion: although there are some at least a bit usable enhancements on Facebook I would be really happy if there would be an option to disable this whole third-party crap. It is not what I came there for and even though occasional flirt (yes, most applications are dating related) does not hurt it is just not worth it.