

Facebook as Nonfad - unalone
http://unalone.net/facebook.html

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jasongullickson
Facebook is rotting from the inside out due to its lack of control of third-
party applications. A year ago I could look at my "feed" and see interesting
things that my friends were doing; now all I see is information about the
(very) lame games they are playing.

Have you ever been over to a friend's house and watched them play a videogame?
That's about how much fun Facebook has become, and the signal-to-noise ratio
grows worse every day. If Facebook provides any "utility", as this article
describes it, it is being strangled by the constant flow of boring information
being auto-generated by these games and applications.

~~~
unalone
It takes about one session of five minutes to block all those applications
permanently. I haven't seen a single non-Facebook app in half a year, and
before then I saw a handful at most.

The one thing Facebook doesn't do is regulate itself. If you want to block
those things it takes a little initiative.

~~~
jasongullickson
Interesting....how do you go about this?

I've been able to block application invitations, etc. but I've found no way to
eliminate the "updates" from the news feed.

~~~
natrius
Click "Hide" next to the item in the feed you want to hide. You'll be able to
either "Hide Julie" or "Hide FarmVille."

~~~
jasongullickson
This is alright, but not much better than spam control from 2000 which is
silly because unlike spam, Facebook knows what updates come from third-party
apps...

...there should just be an "off" button

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TimothyFitz
Why is this page styled with Facebook's CSS and header? Who is this written
by?

~~~
unalone
Me. The HTML page is directly taken from the original Facebook note.

I added an author cred to clear up confusion.

~~~
mdg
Interesting and effective

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gojomo
There's still a risk to Facebook that they'll come to be seen as stodgy as new
generations come online. But given how well they've been conscious of, and
managed, the risks of trends passing them by so far, I don't think it's a
major threat.

In many ways Facebook's end-user lock-in is much stronger than even Google's
lock on the search-user -- the folks who are now populating Facebook do not
flitter to every new thing online, as a group, pulling all their
relationships. (Google's economic lock on the advertising-clearinghouse side
is still stronger.)

