Yes, I’m One Too (Please Facebook, Don’t Become the Next MySpace)

The college life, it’s awesome really. Take yesterday for example. I had no classes in the afternoon; hence I should have been doing something constructive. But, what was I really doing?

I was surfing Facebook.

Something about the site is so intriguing to me. Nowhere else can you have so much interaction with others with only a few clicks of your mouse. I love it.

What is beginning to irk me, however, is the amount of freedom Facebook has recently given to its users and developers.

Facebook originated as a college only site. It took awhile before high schools and workplaces were added to the system, and now it’s open to anyone with an email address. In my opinion, Facebook should have remained a closed system; that was part of its original beauty to me. A tight control on admission would have allowed them to stop some problems that other social networking sites (read MySpace) have had.

Perhaps the most annoying thing that Facebook has done is that it has allowed for third party applications to be placed on user’s profiles. Although I don’t find every application to be a nuisance (I personally use the myBlog, Top Friends, and Who’s Your Tiger applications), they start becoming a problem when users feel the need to proliferate their profiles with them. I don’t want to have to sift through a mile long block of applications just to get to somebody’s wall. Nor do I care who drop kicked, hugged, kissed, or bitch slapped someone else.

The last thing Facebook needs is to allow that much freedom to its users. Sure it’s kind of a socialist attitude, but in this case, it’s better for Facebook’s users and for itself. I’ve used other sites in the past where color schemes could be determined by the user, and let me tell you, there were some nasty ones. I don’t want to be distracted by an annoying animation or badly chosen colors each time I try to visit someone’s profile. If Facebook every does allow such leniency, I can tell you I will not frequent it as often as I do now.