App Attack

Time and energy are sucked into Facebook like a black hole. Efficiency wanes. Productivity escapes. Quality collapses. Facebook is used as a means to procrastinate; an instrument allowing us to gaze into the lives of acquaintances or, worse yet, complete strangers.

Enter Facebook applications.

As if a single time-waste tool wasn't enough, users are now greeted with a plethora of insidious applications.

Having a name at the top of the alphabet allows me the uniquely horrid position of receiving an invite for just about any application ever to appear on the Book de Faces. Apps recommend and encourage users to send invitations to their "friends." These apps generally suggest the first ten friends from the top of an alphabetized list. The gruesome result is an app inbox filled with the likes of...

Castle Age. Friend Stats. Happy Hour With Friends. Where Should You Be Living? Yearbook. What Badass Animal are you? MyCalendar. Which Jon and Kate plus 8 character are you? FrontierVille. CityVille. FarmVille. Papaya Farm. Nightclub City. Fish Life. Fish World. FARKLE. My Zoo. Knighthood. Mafia Wars. Mobsters 2: Vendetta. The True Age Test. Pirates: Rule the Caribbean! Birthday Cards. ATTACK! What does your sign say about you.. ? (:

...just to name a few. Yes, there were omissions, and no, I did not add that emoticon to the end of the last one.

The reward for successfully enticing a friend to join, as I understand it, is points within the application. If a friend joins Knighthood via your invitation, you'll rank up. If a friend accepts an invite to Papaya Farm, your papaya harvest will be extra bountiful. If a friend signs on to Which Jon and Kate plus 8 character are you?, Kate will push out another one.

Once the application model is spelled out their true existence becomes painfully clear. Pyramid schemes. Every app that encourages and rewards the spamming of friends with relentless invitations can be classified as a pyramid scheme. The only buy in is your time and the respect of your friends.

The reasons for avoiding pyramid schemes are the same for avoiding Facebook apps - both are a waste of time and allow infiltrators access to your life and your powerful, valuable network. Life is too short to be spent sending impersonal cyber "drinks" to your friends. Personal information is profitable and should not be traded to app developers for an electronic nightclub. Relationships are valued and will bear greater bounty than any amount of time spent cultivating two-dimensional crops.

I realize by writing this I open myself up to an onslaught of application invites, and perhaps I deserve that for also ignoring twenty-six friend invites. Just keep in mind, if you're hoping to receive an extra fish in Fish World by sending me an invite, you'll be disappointed and defriended.

xoxo,
ShavedGolf