Facebook has exploded in the last twelve months. Leaving MySpace, Orkut, and the rag tag group of other social networking sites in the dust, it has single handedly surmounted the world of telling everyone everything regardless of whether or not they actually wanted to know. Only Twitter is able to stave off the blitzkrieg of Facebook, and then only because stupid people haven't figured out how awful it is.I joined Facebook a few months ago at the incessant urging of small people from Scandinavia. Upon further inspection, I acquiesced to the request because Facebook looked like MySpace without the dumb. It was friends connected to other friends and there was some writing of stuff back and forth. It had a pretty clean interface and, minus the AJAX fetish that seems to permeate the site, it works pretty well.
Oh my, how wrong I was.
You see, on Facebook lies the concept of applications. These applications are about as varied as they come, but they all share one defining feature: they are all completely stupid.
Share a round of drinks! Send a hug! Give a smile! Take a quiz! Become a fan of crab people! Most of this crap isn't even possible, much less a passing excuse for social interaction. Never in all my life have I been more thankful for the, "block this application" feature than I am with Facebook.
Sure, Facebook is a lot less intrusive than MySpace, and certainly looks less like a drunk monkey vomited all over my computer screen than MySpace, but it is still sheer crap.
In a clean package.