It’s also why you’re limited on how many “invites” you can send via Facebook applications. Apparently the developers realized people might flee from their service if they were bombarded with random invites constantly (see “MySpace“). Most people still receive several invites from different friends, but the number is much smaller than if there were no limitations on applications.

I rarely accept app invites. The Facebook dev platform, in my opinion, is not safe enough to entrust my information to at random. I take very few steps to conceal my privacy on the web – most of my social networking profiles are completely open and contain a lot of information short of my social security number or a debit card PIN. If you’re intelligent about how you use the web you can get away with this. If you enjoy clicking random advertisements, entering your home address for the prize you’ve !!!JUST WON!!!, or even your phone information, you can’t get away with this. People that want your information have become very skilled at setting up traps so that less tech savy people do all the work for them. They’re not interested in actively targeting individuals, for the most part. Or maybe I’m just naive, believing I have nothing worthwhile to steal.

Uh.. Anyways, somehow this turned into a rant.

At one point or another I’ve accepted family invites via a Facebook relative application. Also, during last fall’s election I had added Obama’s profile to receive news updates on Facebook. The applications on Facebook often send you messages about a friend who’s recommended something for you or wants to be linked to you in some way. Please note that those messages are bullshit.

Obama has added you as a cousin. True story?

There was only one flaw with Facebook and that was the introduction of applications. While at least that concept had promise and had actual useful functions, it was a destroyer of bandwidth. Between rotting zombies, fucking vampires, and pointless additional walls, you just couldn’t escape it. And then on top of all the random ass images from those shitty apps, someone went and made an application to display random ass images without a purpose. Yeah, even I have the bumper sticker application. Everyone does and that’s why it takes full minutes to view someones page sometimes. Whatever, it’s been implemented and I understand that. Great. Whatever. Let’s use it.

But then you pull this horrible three-column design out of no where. I undestand you needed to get applications off of the front page of people’s profiles. I’m completely for that, but why did you have to completely remove any originality Facebook had in doing so? I liked the old layout. I’m pretty sure most people liked the old layout.

So here’s a better option. Let’s go back to the old page but rip out the ability to put apps on your front page. Instead, we basically do what you had started doing with extended profiles, but make it mandatory. Put a giant ass button at the top that would load a second page dedicated to an user’s application. If someone wanted to view them, they then could. That’s basically what you’ve done here. . . You didn’t need to include the new eye-raping design feature.

I didn’t need that. If I wanted it, someone could have written an application. . .

If Facebook and MySpace would open up a little bit, imagine how nice it would be to send your status across multiple services. For instance, I like having Twitter for it’s stand-alone “what am I doing” style status. It would be nice if I could tell Facebook and MySpace to import a status RSS feed from Twitter, which it already has available for anyone to use. For you still not quite up to speed on web trends, that would basically pull anything I posted on twitter to be displayed on Facebook and MySpace so I didn’t have to login to multiple networks.

Why isn’t this happening now? Probably stubborness to keep you on one social network and not drift to others. Most of these sites make the majority of their revenue serving adverts on your pages – just like TV commercials but the majority of them have content and services you don’t have to pay for. Now I honestly don’t think it really would have a huge impact on revenue to add this – infact, I know I’d rather use a service that was more open to making it easier for their users.

Unfortunately, services like Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us and more aren’t being utilized by average internet users. Don’t get me wrong – these sites have a large database of users, but they’re still not touching your average teenage to adolescent userbase in areas like the midwest – and while I know few users in my area taking advantages of these services, almost everyone has both a Facebook and a MySpace. If the demand was there, I’m sure we’d see even more support across websites and services.

There’s so many ideas that would be very neat if implemented to provide support and data across networks. Unforunately, data always has a price and everyone wants it, no matter how mundane it seems to you.

And one last thing, as a side note. Facebook and MySpace are virtually the same anymore – including both having applications which you’ll see rolling out on MySpace very soon. I’ve been tinkering with the opensocial API (I signed up for the dev program after writing my last post on API) and it’s easy enough to use that I’d put a pretty good wager on you’ll start getting those invites you hate on Facebook in your MySpace inbox any day here.

If you’re going to forum together for a cause, why not this bogus war? The retarded president? Why not choose an issue like civil rights? Why is it that groups fighting for stem cell research and gay rights have less than 1% of the members of a group on Facebook trying to change the front page layout?

Conservatism – 1

Society – 0

1) Login to your MySpace.
2) Click “View My: Blog”
3) Copy the shortcut/url that “rss” leads to. You can see the “rss” link at the top of your blog, below the header, on the right side. It will look something like “http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=YOURPROFILEIDT”

Like I said. Nifty, huh? You can also do this with flickr feeds.