Study reveals shocking truth: Most Facebook apps are silly, pointless
(Credit: FlowingData)The world of social networking may never be the same.
A new study from number-crunching firm Flowing Data did some eye-opening work recently, dividing 23,160 Facebook applications into 22 categories. A whopping 9,601 of them fall into Facebook's "just for fun" category, followed by "gaming" and "sports" with over 2,000 each. In other words, the majority of Facebook applications are goofy time-wasters.
This is an unsettling piece of news that I don't think any of us saw coming.
It's true, though. Since the debut of Facebook's developer platform, there has been an onslaught of annoy-your-friends applications like Slide's SuperPoke and popular gaming apps like Scrabulous. But really "useful" applications have yet to make the same kind of splash, despite a few promising debuts like Six Apart's Blog It and quasi-promising ones like the "social college application" widget.
Caroline McCarthy, a CNET News staff writer, is a downtown Manhattanite happily addicted to social-media tools and restaurant blogs. Her pre-CNET resume includes interning at an IT security firm and brewing cappuccinos. E-mail Caroline.
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not as annoying as Myspace profiles. After all, Facebook Apps, can
at least be collapsed so you only see the ones that you are
interested in.
In anycase, we have created an education/utility app called schoolspace - you can check it out: http://apps.facebook.com/schoolspace/
My research with more than 2,500 social networkers and 1,000 of their parents confirm these assertions as does my book, "Me, MySpace, and I: Parenting the Net Generation." For more information on my work, please visit www.Me-MySpace-and-I.com or email me at LROSEN@CSUDH.EDU