Facebook: What Have You Done To Yourself?

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jul 29, 2007

I have a problem with you: the website formerly known as thefacebook.com. When I joined you back in 2003, you were a nobody.

I was a dumb college kid running around looking for a way to show off the number of friends I have in a more fashionable way than Friendster. And I wanted to know who my friends’ friends were along with their favorite quotes, their favorite movies, some of their contact info. That is it!

Why the hell should I care if my friends “SuperPoke me?” Why should Facebook tell me to bite my friends in a “vampire vs. werewolf adventure?” Nor do I want to “Grow-a-Gift.”

There are thousands of users that belong to certain applications. Why do they decide to join these applications? SPAM!

Almost every application asks a user to invite all of their friends. What is Facebook turning into? I’ll tell you what… Facebook applications are pretty much emulating Tagged.com, a social network that I consider to be spam.

Tagged is a social network based in San Francisco that automatically by default invites your friends via email to join their social network.

To join a majority of Facebook applications, there is a form that by default has your friends check-marked to be invited to use the same applications.

There is a way to opt out of inviting your friends from the application, but many people do not pay attention to that.

Tagged penetrates its users’ contact information from e-mails and insists that these so-called references join Tagged.com as well.

Some of America’s top bloggers are declaring “Facebook bankruptcy,” meaning they are going to de-activate their account. And to be honest, if it wasn’t for Facebook’s photo album system, I’d be gone too.

Facebook and Zuckerberg: get back to the basics. Otherwise, incoming college students will not have the same level of excitement when they join. It’s only a matter of time until a Facebook alternative is released for people who want to be part of something elite and not have third-parties solicitations.