Facebook is rotting from the inside out due to its lack of control of third-party applications. A year ago I could look at my "feed" and see interesting things that my friends were doing; now all I see is information about the (very) lame games they are playing.
Have you ever been over to a friend's house and watched them play a videogame? That's about how much fun Facebook has become, and the signal-to-noise ratio grows worse every day. If Facebook provides any "utility", as this article describes it, it is being strangled by the constant flow of boring information being auto-generated by these games and applications.
It takes about one session of five minutes to block all those applications permanently. I haven't seen a single non-Facebook app in half a year, and before then I saw a handful at most.
The one thing Facebook doesn't do is regulate itself. If you want to block those things it takes a little initiative.
This is alright, but not much better than spam control from 2000 which is silly because unlike spam, Facebook knows what updates come from third-party apps...
find one of those incredibly annoying app ads in your status feed. there should be a little button in the upper right corner. click it, and a menu comes down. one of the options allows you to not see anything more from 'mafia wars' or 'farmville' or whatever the latest stupid thing is.
Have you ever been over to a friend's house and watched them play a videogame? That's about how much fun Facebook has become, and the signal-to-noise ratio grows worse every day. If Facebook provides any "utility", as this article describes it, it is being strangled by the constant flow of boring information being auto-generated by these games and applications.