Facebook app parodies are better than Facebook apps

Something Awful [via Gawker] has a page of fictional "awful Facebook invitations" that do a good job of distilling the current state of Facebook applications: They are awful.  My favorite is this one:

But I'd rather install Remember Lite Brites than most real applications. There are now 21,000 apps, almost half of which are in the "Just For Fun" category.  Here are a few of those — and remember, these are real applications that someone decided to design and construct for your enjoyment:

And after the jump is just a tiny fraction of the incredible number of "What kind of [BLANK] are you?" applications.  Maybe this is a generation-gap situation here, but I simply don't see the appeal in identifying yourself with lots of different kinds of things.  If there's anyone out there who does, please let me know.

The New York Times front-paged an article on the popular Facebook application Scrabulous on Sunday, supplying ammunition to that uppity New Media set that's always accusing the Old Media of being several steps behind. In defense of the Old Media, we here at the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on Scrabulous some months ago — so there, critics!

The NYT piece focuses on the curious and, OK, downright amusing war between physical board game makers and virtual ones. Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to the classic Scrabble game, are being obdurate (score: 17!) about admitting that more people probably play Scrabulous every day than they ever did Scrabble.

God forbid these stuffy Old Gaming giants do a deal with the two Indian Web wizards who handed them their best publicity coup in history.

Hasbro and Mattel aren't even directly quoted in the piece (they never returned my calls when I tried to contact them either — it was like trying to get a comment from the Knights Templar). All Hasbro said, in a statement, was that it had its own electronic version of the game coming out. Which could well have trouble competing against the perfectly good Scrabulous. 

The amazing question is: If Facebook is such a threat to established board game revenue, why don't any of the giant game manufacturers have app versions of their games up yet? Battleship*? Nope. Trivial Pursuit? Nope. Risk? Uh-uh. 

There is a Boggle* application.  But what does Hasbro think of that?  The world may never know.

*Note: Sea Wars is a pretty decent BS substitute.

*Note II: Is it me or is the Boggler board, at right, like, extra barren?

An interesting NYT article by Maria Aspan shows how hard it is to delete your Facebook account. 

Does anyone disagree that with anything relating to online privacy, you should never have to click more than two buttons?  (1) A button that does exactly what you want it to do (e.g. delete account) immediately after you click, and (2) a second button confirming you meant to do the first thing.

But with Facebook and other beehives of demographic honey, it's not that easy. No delete button in sight. No delete request form. Just a "deactivate" option. To get your account vaporized, you've got to actually write to Facebook. And who has time to write anymore?

 

It's as though they're doing you a favor by letting go of your information.  Forget that you did them a favor by giving them free, monetizable information in the first place. Sally, you said we could have your birthday! You said so! Teacher, Sally said we could have her birthday and now she wants it back!

The NYT article quotes Steve Mansour, who had a heck of a time getting his Facebook account deleted.  In a long, fruitless series of complaints to TRUSTe (the privacy watchdog that vouches for Facebook's information practices), Mansour makes a cogent case that when you're away, TRUSTe may not exactly be watching your dog.

Just to be the devil's advocate for a moment, though, let's remember who put all that information on the Internet in the first place ...

Post your deletion and/or privacy stories in the comments. And be assured that the L.A. Times will not sell your personal anecdotes to any third party ...

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno

NYT discovers Scrabulous; what about Boggle?

The New York Times front-paged an article on the popular Facebook application Scrabulous on Sunday, supplying ammunition to that uppity New Media set that's always accusing the Old Media of being several steps behind. In defense of the Old Media, we here at the Los Angeles Times ran a piece on Scrabulous some months ago — so there, critics!

The NYT piece focuses on the curious and, OK, downright amusing war between physical board game makers and virtual ones. Hasbro and Mattel, which own the rights to the classic Scrabble game, are being obdurate (score: 17!) about admitting that more people probably play Scrabulous every day than they ever did Scrabble.

God forbid these stuffy Old Gaming giants do a deal with the two Indian Web wizards who handed them their best publicity coup in history.

Hasbro and Mattel aren't even directly quoted in the piece (they never returned my calls when I tried to contact them either — it was like trying to get a comment from the Knights Templar). All Hasbro said, in a statement, was that it had its own electronic version of the game coming out. Which could well have trouble competing against the perfectly good Scrabulous. 

The amazing question is: If Facebook is such a threat to established board game revenue, why don't any of the giant game manufacturers have app versions of their games up yet? Battleship*? Nope. Trivial Pursuit? Nope. Risk? Uh-uh. 

There is a Boggle* application.  But what does Hasbro think of that?  The world may never know.

*Note: Sea Wars is a pretty decent BS substitute.

*Note II: Is it me or is the Boggler board, at right, like, extra barren?

An interesting NYT article by Maria Aspan shows how hard it is to delete your Facebook account. 

Does anyone disagree that with anything relating to online privacy, you should never have to click more than two buttons?  (1) A button that does exactly what you want it to do (e.g. delete account) immediately after you click, and (2) a second button confirming you meant to do the first thing.

But with Facebook and other beehives of demographic honey, it's not that easy. No delete button in sight. No delete request form. Just a "deactivate" option. To get your account vaporized, you've got to actually write to Facebook. And who has time to write anymore?

 

It's as though they're doing you a favor by letting go of your information.  Forget that you did them a favor by giving them free, monetizable information in the first place. Sally, you said we could have your birthday! You said so! Teacher, Sally said we could have her birthday and now she wants it back!

The NYT article quotes Steve Mansour, who had a heck of a time getting his Facebook account deleted.  In a long, fruitless series of complaints to TRUSTe (the privacy watchdog that vouches for Facebook's information practices), Mansour makes a cogent case that when you're away, TRUSTe may not exactly be watching your dog.

Just to be the devil's advocate for a moment, though, let's remember who put all that information on the Internet in the first place ...

Post your deletion and/or privacy stories in the comments. And be assured that the L.A. Times will not sell your personal anecdotes to any third party ...

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno

Getting off Facebook: 1984 or just 2008?

An interesting NYT article by Maria Aspan shows how hard it is to delete your Facebook account. 

Does anyone disagree that with anything relating to online privacy, you should never have to click more than two buttons?  (1) A button that does exactly what you want it to do (e.g. delete account) immediately after you click, and (2) a second button confirming you meant to do the first thing.

But with Facebook and other beehives of demographic honey, it's not that easy. No delete button in sight. No delete request form. Just a "deactivate" option. To get your account vaporized, you've got to actually write to Facebook. And who has time to write anymore?

 

It's as though they're doing you a favor by letting go of your information.  Forget that you did them a favor by giving them free, monetizable information in the first place. Sally, you said we could have your birthday! You said so! Teacher, Sally said we could have her birthday and now she wants it back!

The NYT article quotes Steve Mansour, who had a heck of a time getting his Facebook account deleted.  In a long, fruitless series of complaints to TRUSTe (the privacy watchdog that vouches for Facebook's information practices), Mansour makes a cogent case that when you're away, TRUSTe may not exactly be watching your dog.

Just to be the devil's advocate for a moment, though, let's remember who put all that information on the Internet in the first place ...

Post your deletion and/or privacy stories in the comments. And be assured that the L.A. Times will not sell your personal anecdotes to any third party ...

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno

Apptitude: Steal My Booty

Welcome one and all (and at this point I think one is all) to the maiden installment of Web Scout's first regular feature, Apptitude.  I'll be doing quick takes on the best, worst and funniest new Facebook applications, and with perhaps 1,000 new apps being launched every week, we (that's us two, reader) shouldn't have much trouble finding grist for the mill.  In fact, I'd like to invite you to contribute suggestions for the most or least interesting apps, and we can be a dynamic reviewing duo!

I'll heave off this little feature with a look at Steal My Booty, a Warner Brothers app-vertisement for the Matthew McConaughey-Kate Hudson Valentine vehicle "Fool's Gold."

"Fool's Gold" is a romantic comedy about treasure hunting, a conceit so easy and tired that fully 38% of all stories ever told have made use of it in some way.  Likewise, "Steal My Booty" follows in the footsteps of thousands of apps before it, existing less as a game than as a computer worm, designed to functionlessly propagate itself onto as many profiles as possible.

The object of the game is to steal treasure from your friends' chests. Stealing a fistful of doubloons is not difficult -- nothing so complex as hand-eye coordination or puzzle-solving is required. All you have to do is position your mouse pointer over the desired plunder and press the button. 

Key to the game, the creators remind you, is "gaining experience points earned by inviting people to play." Translation: You win by inviting more people.  Puts one in mind of good old elementary school magazine drives, where publishers and distributors cadged door-to-door sales labor off young children by rewarding them not with wages but with Weeples.

The above image tells the story-: Play Steal My Booty for a few minutes and you're sure to find that, try as you might, you're unable to grasp the point.

-- David Sarno

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno

Appflation

Speaking of apps that are built to encourage viral propagation ... which is, like, all of them ...

Check out Adonomics’ Leaderboard, a kind of billboard chart for Facebook applications (of which there are now more than 13,000 and growing rapidly). As of today, Facebook app cranker-outer Slide owns two of the top three spots with its FunWall and Top Friends apps. Top Friends, which mirrors an old MySpace feature by letting you pick your elite pals, has been installed by nearly 24 million users (for reference, the 10 most populous cities in the U.S. have about 24 million people combined).

RockYou’s Super Wall is a close second, with 22 million users and a valuation of $26 million, according to Adonomics’ criteria, which factor in number of installs and active users in deciding an app’s potential to generate advertising revenue.

Mess around with any of Adonomics' top five and you'll see that proselytizing to new users is not just a central feature of these apps but indeed feels like the primary purpose. (The most blatant example of a Ponzi app is Hot Potato, which asks you to pass a virtual hot potato to as many new friends as possible (each one, of course, needs to install the app in order to pass the potato to the next poor fellow who needs to install the app to pass the potato).

"Invite more friends to improve (y)our popularity!" shouts Top Friends. Parens mine.

But with all this promiscuous app-passing, much of which is fueled by new Facebook users who don't know any better, could the popularity of the most viral apps be a sort of subprime app bubble?  Despite the top apps' huge user bases, if Facebookers come to associate them with junk and fakery — the Wikipedia entry on "chain letter" already singles out Super Wall and FunWall — the apps are not invulnerable.  Facebook groups like "I HATE SUPERWALL/FUNWALL" already have thousands of irate members.

Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recently uninstalled Super Wall himself.  Facebook, he said, is bound by a rule that's affected other open online platforms that empower users to create their own applications — like the Web itself.

"The more open it is, the more successful it is," said Zittrain. "The more successful it is, the more vulnerable it is, which makes it less successful."

Zittrain said that there's a common challenge facing these open systems — Super Wall, FunWall and Facebook itself: "Can you survive your own success?"

— David Sarno

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno

Beware the spammer within

Yesterday, while playing around with Facebook’s most popular application, Super Wall, I apparently  sent an image of two half-dressed college women kissing while perched atop beer kegs to SEVENTY-SIX of my valued friends. The caption read, "COLLEGE: The only place where ... like this happens!"

I say “I apparently sent,” because I have no memory of sending any such ridiculous or embarrassing “greeting card” — to anyone, let alone everyone.

Still, the episode was a textbook example of what's been happening to Facebook lately. (I have a pair of examples, really: I was also hoodwinked into mass-posting an image of a crying baby captioned, “Please mommy, no more peas.”)

No doubt I clicked the wrong button at some point — failing to realize that the application, lying in wait for me to do just that, had automatically selected dozens of my friends as recipients for the "accidental" mega-spam. Checking out my own Super Wall, and those of friends, it's more than clear that I'm not the first to take this new form of bait.

Until recently, Facebook has provided a largely spam-free environment. It's difficult for spammers to operate, since there are no e-mail addresses. Likewise, installing apps is an exclusively "opt-in" process — you can never be inundated with applications or solicitations because you only get what you sign up for.

But apps like Super Wall and FunWall seem engineered for frivolous mass-messaging. At their core, they've improved on Facebook's original Wall by allowing users to post video, audio and photos in addition to text messages. These new Walls have devolved, however, by not only making it easy to spam dozens of your friends with one errant click — but also making it hard not to. 

Take a look at the average Super Wall . You're likely to see it plastered with chain letters, annoying images and even clever trick-spam. If you don't agree that a message titled "click forward to see what happens" is clever enough to fool you, look around: You may be in the minority. I was.

-- David Sarno