
Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless - nickb
http://www.alleyinsider.com/2008/5/confirmed_facebook_apps_are_useless
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markbao
This is something that I love to hate: when people think Facebook is the new
platform for web applications.

Newsflash: it isn't.

The goal of the Facebook platform is to be an application userbase and
interaction system that allows people to be social and _connect with each
other._ There are some non-fun applications like Files, but those are
auxiliary ones that are use-it-when-you-need-to applications.

I am tired of applications that have nothing to do with being social being
created.

However, one thing with the article is that it doesn't take into account the
number of applications that are made by spam applications (read: quizzes and
forced invites.) Would be interesting to see how it turns out after that, but
it would probably be similar, with a little less in the Just for Fun category.

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tmdg
Though I don't completely disagree that many Facebook apps are useless, when
did fun become useless?

~~~
bridgetroll
when, because of diminishing returns, one reaches the margin where wasting
time is no longer providing significant benefits (such as feeling better).

~~~
iamdave
Fun became "useless" when we started analyzing it, poking and prodding it.

At the same time, apps became useless when people started making "apps" like
Vampires, Mob Wars and called them "applications" instead of 'games'.

What a beautiful game of wordplay we play.

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pc
The distribution of websites generally probably isn't hugely different.

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henning
Beware of categorizing something as a toy and not relevant to serious business
computing. IBM did that with xerography, minicomputers, and PCs.

That said, I don't understand Facebook and I don't understand why anyone cares
about it.

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chaostheory
the real numbers may even be worse due to miscategorization. games like 'mob
wars' and 'vampires' are currently being categorized as 'utility' apps...

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caveman82
Does anyone know why fb is so slow all the time especially with all the
resources they have?

~~~
irrelative
Part of it is the large number of css and javascript files they load on each
page. Visiting the home page (and not logged in) results in 34 http requests.
Roughly 1/3 are images, and the rest are javascript and css. That many
requests slows down all page loading, even when locally cached. If I were
facebook (the best I have is a parody site of facebook:
<http://farcebook.codeirony.com/>), I would put all the css into 1 file, and
all the js into 1 file.

The other part is that they have a ton of users. It's a non trivial problem to
make pages load quickly while providing dynamic content for millions of users.

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ad
I want to post something, since I seem to be more optimistic about facebook
plugins than anyone else posting here so far, but the only things I came up
with was lame stuff like "too soon to tell" or "just wait and see"

so here goes: just wait and see

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mosburger
With that title, I was half-expecting this to be a Hank Williams "Why Does
Everything Suck?" blog post. :)

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jdroid
Umm... duh?

