Facebook Application Trickery

I had been very careful to avoid adding some of the many applications available on Facebook, until recently when I decided to add as many as possible in 15 minutes. The result was not only chaos on my profile, but the discovery of Faceook's trickery. On a few of the applications, in order to use them, you have to send the application to 10 or more friends. In addition, your profile is queried higher in search results with the more people you disseminate it to. Ridiculous. I just wanted to find out who had a crush on me, but I guess it wasn't meant to be.

The one good thing about adding content to your Facebook profile that has been an improvement to MySpace's format has been the ability to hide applications on your profile. So why am I analyzing this so much? I think it will be interesting to see how Google will handle applications, and how the clutter and cleanliness will affect each network.

Scrabulous not so fabulous

While we're on the subject, a little note of interest for all half-a-million daily users of the Scrabulous app. Facebook has been asked to scrap the popular game (is that a pun? intended none the less) as Hasbro/Mattel believe it violates their copyright of the board game Scrabble.

Rory Cellan-Jones a BBC technology correspondent put it best by saying, "Early dreams of being a happy-clappy, open-source, 'do no evil' kind of business soon fade when the realisation dawns that you are worth suing"

About 15,000 people signed a petition in the 2 days following the request to delete the Scrabulous app. We'll see where this goes. It's not like you can't play a scrabble game somewhere else on the internet. jeez.