It seems everybody’s on Facebook at the moment, or nearly everybody, posting personal information and interacting with friends and acquaintances.
One of the most popular parts of Facebook (and one which other social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace have only recently managed to catch up with) is the ability to add “applications” to your profile.
With applications such as Scrabulous, Superpoke and Nations, Facebook users can play games with, throw sheep at and generally interact with their Facebook friends. When users haven’t installed an application they’re sent an invitation to share in whatever it is their friend has found.
However there has been a trend in applications recently which has sparked online protests and petitions. Some applications, for example some quizzes, will let you add the application, take the test but will refuse to give you your results unless you invite 20 of your friends to try it too. This has angered many Facebook users (myself included) and taken a lot of the fun out of adding applications (it has also vastly increased the number of unwanted invitations)
Facebook have announced a series of measures to put things right, including:
- The ability to report misbehaving applications
- The ability to block invites from a specific application
- The requirement that applications want you in advance if they’re going to force you to invite all of your friends
This is a prime example of putting things right so that you don’t annoy your customers – one of the most basic rules. Hopefully these measures will bring some of the fun back into Facebook applications and quizzes – Maybe I’ll finally be able to find out which Disney character I’m most like.
For the past few months I’ve been using a piace of software called