You’ve probably already read somewhere that Facebook has been added to the 2008 Collins English Dictionary – as both a noun and a verb!  So if you say ‘I was up Facebooking until very late’ that’s proper usage – hurrah.

I have a feeling if they keep going the way they are though, Facebook may well find themselves being the butt of the proverbial ‘And if you look up ’spam’ your picture is next to it in the dictionary’ as well.

Facebook is undoubtedly a useful platform, and it has certainly helped me to reconnect with several long, lost friends – which is a great thing.  But lately, when I think of Facebook, I really think of ‘Getting Facebooked’ in an entirely negative way.

I fire up Facebook less and less often, because when I do I almost invariably get hit with a good number of Facebook ‘invites’ that represent increasingly stupid and annoying Facebook ‘apps’.  Some of my beef with these may well be down to user error – like I said, I use it less and less often, so I probably need to look a little for the best ways to turn some of this crap off. 

But … it still seems just plain wrong the way most / all of the Facebook apps (and that is such an undeservedly complimentary term for a lot of the drivel that gets passed off under that label) are designed to work by default.  Here’s a little example of why I find these apps so friggin irritating:

Today I clocked into Facebook for the first time in probably a week or more – and I have 10 invites / requests involving apps in one way or another.  Several say they are “Christmas Card Requests’

OK, so I’ll bite and have a look at those I thought – but of course to be able to have a look I have to install the related application – So I did that.  Then of course during the Install process, I’m prompted to the effect of ‘Don’t you want to spam ALL your friends with … output of this application?’ No I f***ing don’t – I didn’t on the last app I installed, or the one before that, or on any app that I’ve ever installed, thanks very much!!!

I’m guessing / hoping there’s a way to turn off that default behaviour – but it has not been easily obvious to me where that is so far, and the default of asking to spam all your friends is way beyond annoying.

Anyway, I say no to all of that, and I land back at my Facebook home page and still haven’t seen any Christmas cards, because the ever so clever app took time to offer to spam my pals, but didn’t see fit to jump me to where I can actually view the things that prompted me to install it.  There’s something very, very dumb about that equation.

By then I could probably spend just a little more time to figure out how to get the new app to take me to where I view the cards – but you know what?  I could care less by then.  Any app that finds a way to prompt for spamming, but NOT take you automatically to view the thing that prompted the install, gets exactly ZERO more seconds of my time.

So … when I think of ‘getting Facebooked’ it brings to mind ‘Getting Munsoned’ from the old comedy movie ‘Kingpin’ -  really not a positive vibe to it at all …

Related posts:

1. Zune HD Joins the Facebook Party
2. When Good Apps Go (Potentially) Bad
3. New On The iPhone: Facebook And A Bug
4. Get Your FaceBook On With Windows Mobile
5. Find Me for Facebook from ElectricPocket.