FACEBOOK – Application Requests – Could it be considered spam?

I’ve being away from Facebook for about 2 days or less. Not because I got fed up with that, I’m a bit busy with assignments and exams these days, so trying to disallow it from distracting me. I’m very distraction-prone. :-S.

Anyway, I logged-in to Facebook to see what’s going on there. To my surprise, I had more than 80 invitations for different applications built on Facebook, of course, from my friends, and more than 100 notifications. That’s all within 36 hours or less. I’m mostly have Facebook open, and do whatever I do with requests as soon as I get it.

I don’t add or join most of these applications. There are several thousand applications on Facebook platform. How can one person possibly have all those applications? I don’t want to keep these requests unattended and have to go through the hassle of clicking ‘ignore... ignore... ignore...’ every time. For a single application, there could be requests from 10, 20 or more friends and each would be separate. Couldn’t Facebook, group all requests for each application, so that it would be convenient for the user to either add or ignore the requests with one click. How much time could we save?

Recently, they have grouped the application requests shown on the home page; 5 facelift request, 100 kick-my-a** requests, 1000 other requests. It’s a good improvement. Prior to that, there’d be a long list of requests on the right- sidebar of your home page.

Could it be considered SPAM? Some of the applications wouldn’t allow you to use it unless you invite at least 20 of your friends. “You did not invite enough friends. You must invite 17 more friends”. What the heck!! They are forcing you to invite. They are pushing you to send spam. Some of the applications have a ‘skip’ button in the invitations page, that’s a good thing. I don’t know. Maybe I’m exaggerating. I was clearing up the requests and maybe the irritating ‘right-clicks’ made me write about this.

Is there a better way Facebook could handle this? There are quite lot privacy settings for most of the applications, and the default settings would allow these applications to access your data. These settings can be restricted, but average user won’t be aware of it. Is this a concern? I have got too many questions today, isn’t it? Seriously, we should be aware of Facebook and what's really going on behind it. It's growing rapidly, with hundreds of thousand of new users daily. A lot could happen there. Consider this one of the few warnings!!

Well I’m so busy these days. I’ve being working on an assignment lately; due this week. And got 2 exams coming up next week and I haven’t started reading for that yet. So, doesn’t get much time to do anything else. I might be a little less frequent in updating this, and visiting all of your blogs. Sorry about that! I would be hosting a BIG party here on this blog after my exams... :P

Cheers!

Hammett

Image taken from here.