Garoo

My beef with the new Facebook home page was that avatars are taking too much space — it makes sense on Twitter, where there’s only the user’s avatar, name and status update, but it’s a daunting mess on Facebook where there are photos, thumbnails, smaller text (for application notices), and colored comments — but I somehow hadn’t noticed this:

Yes, the status updates were updates and can now contain photos, links, videos, etc, but if you want to see that one of your friends has become a fan of Calvin and Hobbes, or that they’ve gone from single to married, you need to go to their personal profile to find out.

That is stupid. It’s a great thing to know how to adapt to the evolution of a market, but pushing Twitter envy that far makes no sense. If Facebook was afraid that Twitter might develop into a bona fide social network (by 2025, judging by how fast it adds new functionality), they should integrate with it further, not clone it.

I don’t think Facebook is big enough to pull a Microsoft. Time will tell.

Before, if I created an application for Facebook, I could count on it spreading virally, because users would see that their friends are using the app and some of them would click on it and try it themselves. In the new Facebook, apps have been almost completely killed off.

And, by reducing the natural virality of application discovery, they’re encouraging developers to spam the home pages of their user’s friends with annoying notices. (Because those are displayed. In tiny grey type. Dwarfed by the user’s huge avatar next to them. And sometimes you get five application “stories” in a row, repeating the same huge avatar. Ugh.)

But it’s been evident for a while anyway that Facebook applications has just been an incredibly elaborate publicity stunt.