Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless | Hacker News Reader

Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless

alleyinsider.com

23 pointsnickb13 comments

This is something that I love to hate: when people think Facebook is the new platform for web applications.

Newsflash: it isn't.

The goal of the Facebook platform is to be an application userbase and interaction system that allows people to be social and connect with each other. There are some non-fun applications like Files, but those are auxiliary ones that are use-it-when-you-need-to applications.

I am tired of applications that have nothing to do with being social being created.

However, one thing with the article is that it doesn't take into account the number of applications that are made by spam applications (read: quizzes and forced invites.) Would be interesting to see how it turns out after that, but it would probably be similar, with a little less in the Just for Fun category.

Though I don't completely disagree that many Facebook apps are useless, when did fun become useless?

when, because of diminishing returns, one reaches the margin where wasting time is no longer providing significant benefits (such as feeling better).

Fun became "useless" when we started analyzing it, poking and prodding it.

At the same time, apps became useless when people started making "apps" like Vampires, Mob Wars and called them "applications" instead of 'games'.

What a beautiful game of wordplay we play.

I would hardly say Facebook apps are useless in terms of revenue generation:

http://www.onlineepiphany.com/2008/02/08/how-i-would-get-sta...

The distribution of websites generally probably isn't hugely different.

Beware of categorizing something as a toy and not relevant to serious business computing. IBM did that with xerography, minicomputers, and PCs.

That said, I don't understand Facebook and I don't understand why anyone cares about it.

the real numbers may even be worse due to miscategorization. games like 'mob wars' and 'vampires' are currently being categorized as 'utility' apps...

Does anyone know why fb is so slow all the time especially with all the resources they have?

Part of it is the large number of css and javascript files they load on each page. Visiting the home page (and not logged in) results in 34 http requests. Roughly 1/3 are images, and the rest are javascript and css. That many requests slows down all page loading, even when locally cached. If I were facebook (the best I have is a parody site of facebook: http://farcebook.codeirony.com/), I would put all the css into 1 file, and all the js into 1 file.

The other part is that they have a ton of users. It's a non trivial problem to make pages load quickly while providing dynamic content for millions of users.

I want to post something, since I seem to be more optimistic about facebook plugins than anyone else posting here so far, but the only things I came up with was lame stuff like "too soon to tell" or "just wait and see"

so here goes: just wait and see

With that title, I was half-expecting this to be a Hank Williams "Why Does Everything Suck?" blog post. :)

Umm... duh?

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