CrunchGear

I’m in complete accord with your statement on facebook. It’s becoming increasingly innundated with “applications,” which have made some of my closest friends the most annoying spammers. The beauty of facebook vs. myspace was that it felt like an exclusive club in which you could do a few simple things: Share pictures, talk about the stupid things you did over the weekend, or “stalk” the girl you sat two seats away from in accounting class (yes I did do that).
Facebook is on its way out. It’s losing usership in the U.K. and the U.S. in the last year, and more importantly users are spending less time each visit. That’s the worst signal. Niche sites such as ILife (though I hate it), Artlog, etc, are starting to catch on. I think facebook opened up a can of tainted worms by allowing applications, and then shot itself in the foot with Beacon, and now is on its way to becoming the next myspace. I’m wondering if Microsoft is rethinking its overvaluation of F-book at $15 Billion (then again it’s good at that).

I totally agree with you. I switched from MySpace because the usability was horrible and Facebook had a clean, simple interface. Now Facebook is turning into the same thing. If I get one more ultimate poking plugin request I’m going to scream.

Zuck is doing for Facebook what every other startup should do - focus on value for the user, and give the users what they want. That plugin is a nice feature