Facebook apps have attracted tremendous interest and activity. They are also, it seems to me, killing the Facebook user experience and diminishing the social value that Facebook provides to users. 

It now takes forever to load the profiles of my friends on Facebook because they’ve got so many apps on them. Page response time is critical to a good user experience and Facebook has lost the ability to control it.

Instead of useful news, my Facebook news feed is littered with spam from self-interested applications trying to promote themselves. The usefulness of Facebook for social interactions is going down.

Facebook has created an ecosystem but the ecosystem is being taken over by robots instead of people– armies of annoying applications each trying to make more noise than the next.

I know I’m not the only one complaining about this, consider for example this complain from Trent Adams:

I know that Facebook has a great API that allows anyone to create a new application for Facebook. This has some tremendous possibilities to extend Facebook to do some really amazing things! I am all for this!

What I do have a problem with is that there is not an option to stop all the bombardment of requests for you to add these applications because someone on your friend list did. No one is going to uncheck the users they don’t want the request to go to, so they just send it to everyone. It is really starting to get on my last nerve.

I use a handful of applications myself and make sure that I don’t invade my friends and family with requests to add the same application. It is the same as email spam. Unwanted and unsolicited. I have ignored more requests for applications in the month of August than the previous months combined. I can only imagine that September will be horrible.

Can the genie be put back in the bottle in a way that retains the value of an open application platform while avoiding the pitfalls?   Probably, but as Microsoft has learned it gets harder by the day to correct past platform mistakes.