I haven't really weighed in on the social media sites are bad vs. social media sites are good debate. Nor do I intend to...especially the whole Facebook bashing and Facebook worshiping debate. Everyone else is already doing enough of that for my liking, thank you.
Still, when Hugh MacLeod from gapingvoid posted the following sentiment on his blog, I had to jump in and agree with him:
So what's stopping Facebook from putting in a small, tickable box that says, "Please do not let my 'Friends' send me any more of these REALLY ANNOYING Vampire/Zombie/Super wall/Super Poke/Whatever invites. I really, really don't want them etc..."?
...
[If] they want to fix the problem, they can easily do so. If they do not, they're sadly just consigning themselves to the slushpile of history.
I couldn't agree more. Those incredibly annoying applications are nice for a while -- like the noisy, roll-up blowouts that you get at parties -- but they get very old, very quickly. I should repeat that. They get very old, very quickly.
Still, "friends" keep inviting other "friends" to sign up for those "applications". A commenter on MacLeod's post said that some blogger had called these invitations "fram", which is "spam from friends". I like that.
I also really like Hugh's Third Law:
"If you piss in the soup for long enough, eventually it stops tasting like soup."