Gethan

Today I joined a facebook group. This in itself isn’t momentous, I’ve created 3 and joined about 5 before. Today I joined a group with 100,000 members with one common theme - facebook is becoming spambook - and the users don’t like it. “This has got to stop.” - See the group here - is growing at a rate of 5000 users a day.

Why are facebook users so pissed off?

• Invites from applications - many many every day.
• Pointless annoying items in the newsfeed.
• Beacon - the controversial advertising system that alerts your contacts to actions you have taken on other websites.
• The lack of consideration for privacy.

The problems all boil down to features being added without consideration to the consequences, and an attitude from facebook that really each individual member does not matter.

Why don’t the members just leave?

For every single member of facebook, time and effort has been made to create a profile, to link up with contacts - and facebook are making a lot of money out of this - but enough to justify a valuation of $15 billion? not likely. So facebook continue to develop features most with the ultimate goal of milking the user base - at the expense of privacy and usability.

I resisted joining facebook initially, on maybe the sixth invite I decided maybe I should try it. Lo and behold everyone was there, people I knew from all over the world. So I spent some time, reconnecting with old friends, enjoying facebook as a fantastic new contact management system that trumped the conceited FriendsReunited.com and then some.

I then started work developing applications that would work within facebook, applications that would add value to profiles, that would bring in new users to websites I run. So I’ve invested more than the normal amount of time into learning API’s as well as creating pages and groups, I’ve put too much effort into facebook to just walk away. Damn I wish that wasn’t the case.

I don’t want to play at being a Zombie - please just leave me alone!