Opinion: App Saturation, Facebook and You

JUL 2 2012

Facebook among other things is a very popular avenue for social networking but not without copious amounts of controversy. I could probably write a book about everything Facebook has done to genuinely aggravate its users but I’m going to stick to one subject for the purposes of this article and that is Applications.

Applications can be a fun little tangent for most things involved on Facebook but it has really gotten to a point where they are over saturating the user interfaces and general overall aesthetic of the site. I find it very annoying when I click on a link a friend has posted and a permissions box pops up asking me to install yet another app to my FB account. The biggest perpetrators for this seem to be news outlets with Yahoo! Reader being the biggest offender however when they try and get me to install it… I don’t install it and just do a Google search. Which totally defeats the purpose for Yahoo! and I found the author of the Oatmeal to represent this annoying phenomena quite nicely.

We get that you want to get better connected to your consumer base but trying to cram apps down our throats to mine our information just really gets on my nerves. I want to read these articles but I don’t need an app telling all my friends I just read an article or to try and recruit my friends as well. Its really just another step toward a entirely transparent internet where nothing I do is truly private and we really don’t need hundreds of apps watching everything we do just to get the information we want online. I think that if these companies could see just how unappealing their forced app requests are they might ease up a bit or stop these shenanigans altogether but that would be too easy or the smart thing to do.

JUL
2
2012

Categories

Facebook among other things is a very popular avenue for social networking but not without copious amounts of controversy. I could probably write a book about everything Facebook has done to genuinely aggravate its users but I’m going to stick to one subject for the purposes of this article and that is Applications.

Applications can be a fun little tangent for most things involved on Facebook but it has really gotten to a point where they are over saturating the user interfaces and general overall aesthetic of the site. I find it very annoying when I click on a link a friend has posted and a permissions box pops up asking me to install yet another app to my FB account. The biggest perpetrators for this seem to be news outlets with Yahoo! Reader being the biggest offender however when they try and get me to install it… I don’t install it and just do a Google search. Which totally defeats the purpose for Yahoo! and I found the author of the Oatmeal to represent this annoying phenomena quite nicely.

We get that you want to get better connected to your consumer base but trying to cram apps down our throats to mine our information just really gets on my nerves. I want to read these articles but I don’t need an app telling all my friends I just read an article or to try and recruit my friends as well. Its really just another step toward a entirely transparent internet where nothing I do is truly private and we really don’t need hundreds of apps watching everything we do just to get the information we want online. I think that if these companies could see just how unappealing their forced app requests are they might ease up a bit or stop these shenanigans altogether but that would be too easy or the smart thing to do.

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