Facebook or the art of the spam?

I was reading an article on “Why facebook is just a game” and start wandering about facebook itself. My first contact with the platform was last year, during Hack Day , I made an application for it and therefor had to create an account. I was impressed on how easy it was to integrate it. I had the APIs, I had the open platform. It took me half day to have something running. Now this being said, let see some statistics:

• More than 80 million active users
• Facebook is the 6th most-trafficked website in the world (comScore)
• Facebook is the 2nd most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)
• More than 400,000 developers and entrepreneurs
• Over 24,000 applications have been built on Facebook Platform
• 140 new applications added per day
• More than 95% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on Facebook Platfor

I am not here to verify the figures, but they are quite impressive. 80 millions users… Nice! I had the privilege to follow the keynote made by Jeff Rothschild, Vice President of Technology at Facebook, during the MySQL conf 2008, and it was focus on scalability and performance. Scalability is an issue for facebook but also for all developers willing to launch their application. Your traffic can drastically increase for 0 to millions of users, making your whole system go down…but that is another issue. Now, after why I created an account, the question is, do I use it? The answer is no or almost never.  After creating my account, I started receiving “friendship” requests, over 100 friends now. When I say “friends”, it is a bit quick. Is a friend not someone you are doing stuff with, going out, having drinks,…?   I started playing a bit with different quizz and stuffs but got easily bored. I do not like the idea of installing all the time applications and I am really bored by the SPAMMING “go and try this…”, “click there and see what happen…”. Is that called spam when it sent by your friends? How to spam people without them getting mad? Have the SPAM sent by their friends This being said, I do enjoy getting update of people I know and do not see anymore. Life is made that way, sometimes you are taking different paths.