facebook

So when Facebook came out, it was cool. Myspace had already been out for awhile and established itself as a breeding ground for internet immaturity. One of the big draws about facebook was that it was a cleaner, more private alternative to myspace, one that attracted a more adult crowd. You had to have a college email address to even sign up for an account, semi-exclusive. So for a long time Facebook was a nice place to network, learn fun things, but still maintain a semi-professional community.

In my opinion it's been going downhill lately, and fast. It started when they began to let anyone join facebook. First they opened it up to non-4yr colleges, then to highschools, then everyone. Anyone can sign up for facebook and instead of joining a university network, they can just associate themselves with the city they live in. So now you've got the same adolescent crowd that myspace had beginning to flood facebook. On top of that, they've begun to allow outside parties to script these little 'addons' that add 'fun' little functions to your profile. In this writer's opinion, it's getting as bad as myspace. Most of these are just stupid little gimmicks to attract the younger crowd, and a easy way to advertise the programmers. Don't get me wrong, they aren't all stupid, some of them are pretty handy, but they are all centered around spreading them to all your friends like a virus. Anytime someone adds one of these functions, and then wants to use it with a friend, like have them take a quiz or something, that person then has to add it as well to even be able to view the content (in most cases). Then when you go to add the function to your profile, they ALL go through a page that tells you to "invite all your friends to use xxx addon!!". It's beginning to get annoying when you have lots of friends on your profile and a lot of them are susceptible to 'cutesy' 'fun' things like this, and then spam my mailbox with "So and so wants you to use xxx addon!"

Facebook is going down the toilet...