Faceborked

The backlash was inevitable, really. Facebook had received so much coverage in the press as a Big New Thing, it wouldn't take long for columnists and journalists to start scrabbling to be the first to claim it had jumped the shark. I've read two such articles this morning alone.

And in many ways, I think they're right. As "Web 2.0" social networking sites started to take off, Facebook appeared at first to be the Great White Hope among a sea of lurid MySpace pages. It interface was far cleaner and less cluttered, and it appeared to be much more focussed in it's approach.

I have a natural aversion to anything trendy (Exhibit A: my wardrobe) and I normally jump on bandwagons just as the smart money is jumping off. I'd avoided signing up for MySpace on principle, Twitter seemed too focussed on the kind of minutiae that I have trouble caring about in my own life (let alone other people's), but something about Facebook appealed. So I signed up, recklessly inviting my entire address book to do the same.

I joined just after Facebook's first great revolution: the enabling of plug-in applications that enable third parties to leverage it's social database. At the time it seemed like a genius idea, Facebook would become a "Social Network OS". The only social site you'd ever need, because all the social networking functionality you could think of could be slotted in via an application.

If only it had lived up to expectations, apart from a few genuinely useful applications there emerged a slew of annoying, frustrating and utterly pointless ones. I'm flooded by invites like these every day:

"Dave has given you scrofula! Sign up for 'LurgyParty' and start spreading your own infectious diseases!"

"Jocasta has rated your fragrance in 'Smellrater'! Find out how other people think you smell, and rate your friends' stenches today!"

And so on.

I wonder if Richard Dawkins has a FaceBook profile, because I think he'd agree it's an almost perfect example of selfish genetics. The applications that spread the most don't do so because they're "good", they do so because they're good at spreading. The most ubiquitous apps are the ones written in a way that force you (surreptitiously or otherwise) to forward them on to a load of your friends. Like a successful selfish gene, they don't care what good they do, they just want to replicate.

The better FaceBook apps draw you in like a flower tempting a bee, "yes you can have my delicious nectar... but only after helping me spread my DNA", the bad Facebook apps are more like parasites or viruses, spreading without any reward for their victims at all. There are hardly any apps that I know of that rely on people spreading them because they want to let other people know about them.

So Facebook is broken, groaning under the weight of worthless apps that add no value and ruin the clean MySpace-for-grownups aesthetic which attracted me to it in the first place. I'm on the market for an alternative, but I won't hold my breath.