When I signed up for a facebook account, about a year ago, I was enthralled with it's simplicity. It didn't get in my way, the layout was very nice and organized but you did have a certain degree of flexibility. It contrasted with MySpace in such a way that it felt like the two sites were siblings. MySpace was the 14 year old girl that didn't really know how to use make-up so she just piled it on. Facebook was like the older brother that had just started working for a law firm, fresh out of college. He was fit, clean shaved and a good dresser.

I would check my Facebook account every-other day or so, sometimes more often. When ever I saw that someone had sent me something I knew it would be something from them personally and I should probably respond in some way. We were communicating person-to-person (P2P?), well, maybe not quite person-to-person but pretty close.

A few months later, some rumblings were heard about Facebook possibly opening up a development kit for 3rd party developers. Only a little while later those rumors materialized in the form of the Facebook API. And we all know what happened then.

It was like a tsunami of crap.

Application after application cropped up and profiles were getting really, really big. As in a few pages big. If I would print out some of the profiles my friend have, they would be at least 2-3 pages. Whenever I log in now, I get an average of 15 notifications from various applications trying to solicit me to add them. It's like spam! No wait, it IS spam! And it's horribly annoying. The big brother quit his job and became a pimp. A big, flashy pimp.

Nowadays I hardly even bother with signing in. I do it perhaps bi-weekly. And when I do, I don't have the energy to decline all of those application notifications so I just ignore them. It's a real shame to see the path Facebook went and should be thought of as a lesson to all of you other social networks out there, when you open up your platform, you must be careful. VERY careful. Don't give the API the power to repel users from your site. Especially when you just turned down a LOT of money for it.

That being said, I don't think that Facebook is in trouble, or will be any time soon. It's not so big in Iceland but I hear that in the states it's the de facto standard for college students. It's got such a humongous momentum and I'm not sure exactly what will be able to stop it. It will probably take some big company, with endless pockets, a huge effort to topple Facebook.

It's not like some kids in a garage could change anything...

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