I think greed is one the most damaging of the seven deadly sins. Greed has the potential to destroy the thing you most desire. Greed on a personal level is probably not that damaging its when corporations get in on the act when the carnage starts to happen, for example Facebook.

I used to think Facebook was the greatest of all social network sites. The thing that makes Facebook one of the most popular websites on the net is its ability to install third-party “applications”. These applications mean that their website gets content provided by a third party with the operators of Facebook having to a minimum of work. The makers of the applications get to advertise directly to Facebook users. It is a win-win situation.

The problem occurs when the users install the applications. The application developers want their application used by as many people as possible. The more people the more money they receive from advertising. When installing an application you can invite other people on your friends list to use the application. Every time you receive an invitation it adds it to your request list. When I first started using Facebook you could skip the friend invitation stage and just start using the application, but now Facebook forces you to invite 20 friends before you can use the application. This results in a shit load of unnecessary spam.

I barely have enough time to control e-mail spam and blog comment spam – now I have to deal with Facebook spam as well. Facebook has so many other great features that I will continue to use it – but why do they have to abuse their users like this. Stupid decisions driven by corporate greed could destroy something like Facebook. Users aren’t a commodity they are people – without the users there would be no website. Try showing us a little bit of respect.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 4th, 2008 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Our sad culture, Software, The Internet, War against spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.