Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites today, has major problems with the quality of applications being designed for their site. Most are pointless, many are buggy, few are good, and rare are the must haves. This problem might sort itself out with time, but right now it is a serious growing pain.

Finding sub-par quality applications on the Facebook site is a common theme these days. As frustrating and annoying as it is to navigate through the crap to find that hidden gem, you would think that the Facebook team would do something about it. That has yet to be seen.

A simple glance at the screen capture to the right will reveal some of the more crappy applications available on Facebook right now. Unfortunately, those are not even close to representing the worst that I have seen.

Adding to the frustration, many people install these applications, and I always question why. This only encourages those developers to put out more crap. If you are one of those people who have added the "Are you stupid?" application, then you truly are stupid; there is no avoiding that.

Innovation, skill, and common sense are some of the things that developers utilize to create great applications. I regrettably inform people that many application developers lack all of the aforementioned. It now even annoys me to look through the "newest" section in the application directory; it is just that bad.

I have repeatedly suggested to the Facebook development team some improvements that could be added to their system, but they seem pleased with the way things are going. However, I believe that their carelessness will just make things worse in the long term. It would be extremely disappointing to see one of Facebook's greatest features end up becoming its worst. I sometimes question if that is not already beginning to happen.

I love to use Facebook (I use it on a daily basis), and there is hardly any serious threat to Facebook right now, but there are many improvements that need to be made to the system. MySpace is suffering from a lack of innovation and improvements. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's owner, could easily take Facebook down that same path if he becomes complacent.

Technical analysis can simply be referred to as the study of charts. Like in the financial markets, things tend to trend over time--like growth patterns. MySpace has been trending upwards since 2005. Unsurprisingly, this is no longer the case.

Using several tools like Alexa, Google Trends, Compete, and common sense, I have seen that Facebook has been on a similar path that MySpace has taken in past years. One thing that is different is that Facebook has a much more significant growth pattern. It would not be a crazy idea to believe that Facebook will continue to trend upwards and experience more growth.

MySpace on the other hand, is in a slump. It has broken a nearly three year growth pattern! Facebook's popularity is having a dramatic impact on the growth of MySpace. I know that many of you reading this are likely to have, or have had a MySpace profile. Just a year ago I would have been the recipient of a "WTF" type moment if I told one of my friends that I did not have MySpace account; now I am questioning why I still do have the account open. Maybe some other people are feeling the same way.

If the technical analysis will be correct, and if there is no serious problem with Facebook's future regarding their legal issues, then Facebook could very easily take over the top spot in social networks by the second quarter of 2008. I am not going to flat-out say that this will happen, but it is a significant possibility--if I was betting on the situation, I'd be all-in on Facebook taking the lead. Regardless, it certainly should be no shock to anyone if this is the case.

A message to MySpace:

Dear Tom,

Are you ever going to take steps to actually improve MySpace? You could start by not having my friend's accounts being hijacked and as a result my receiving of spam messages on a daily basis. Also, you could try reducing the amount of obtrusive advertisements; they really annoy me, it is no wonder why people feel the need to use AdBlock Plus. It is such a shame to see one of the most popular social networks being wasted away by News Corp. What is the deal?

Your not top 8 friend,

James Mowery

Facebook is an amazing social network. Some say it is the best social network available. I agree with that statement; however, there is still work to be done. I took it upon myself to compile a list of things Facebook could add that would improve the service not only for myself, but for many others in the future.

In the depths of my brain I was able to come up with the following ideas to improve Facebook:

Application Tagging Support:

By my last count, there were well over 5,000 applications available for the Facebook platform (there were around 4,000 a month ago). That is an impressive amount of applications to try and sort through when searching for anything specific. I'm not going to question why, but instead insist that the Facebook development team gives application developers (or even users) the ability to add tags to describe applications.

For a crude example, if I want an application that is related to tennis, then I should be able to focus in on only those applications that have tags related to tennis and sports. Tags would make things much easier for locating application, and it would assist in the discovery of new applications. This would make both the developers and users happier. Facebook could even add those wonderful little tag-clouds to see what is popular at the current time.

Greater Privacy Control:

One of the greatest features of Facebook is the ability to specify privacy options for your profile. You can go from allowing everyone see everything, to only yourself having access to your information. It was, and still is one of the features that sets Facebook in a league of its own.

I do see limitation with the current setup. For instance, there are some groups of people who I don't mind seeing everything on my profile; there are some groups that I would like to keep from seeing only my contact information, but have access to everything else; and finally, there is a group who I would like to keep from seeing anything but the bare essentials on my profile, like work and business related information. That is three layers of privacy I would like to be able to work with. There are currently only two layers of privacy right now.

Those people who only have a few friends on Facebook might be able to deal with it (like myself for example), but those who have a greater amount of friends might need another layer of privacy. Facebook has advertised in the past about how they allow great privacy control, so I would like to see this added in the future. As an alternative to this, Facebook could possibly give us unlimited privacy layers and just let us create privacy groups instead, and assign friends to each group.

News Feed Options:

I am talking about the information you see when you first login to Facebook. There are a few issues I have with it. I dislike the "popular events in (whichever area/college) network" idea that they came up with. Yet some people might like it. So how about giving us the ability to specify if we want to see this or not?

I also do not appreciate that they display advertisements in the news feed. I would not mind if they changed the background where there is an advertisement to more clearly show that it is an ad, but to throw an it in the content with only the small text of Sponsored seems wrong to me. I know they have to pay the bills, but there are other ways to do this without being overly obtrusive.

Better Photo Quality:

I love taking photographs, and having a place to share them is important. Facebook is a great place to do the sharing part. Sure there are alternative services like Flickr and Photobucket, but why deal with that when you have all your friends on Facebook? So Facebook, let us show higher quality photos.

Right now, I believe the limit is 800 x 600 for photo size; this is sufficient, but I'd like to see higher resolution photographs. I wouldn't mind having an extra advertisement displayed above or below these photographs to cover the cost for hosting larger images. I think it would be a worthy addition. I'm sure most people who snap photos would agree as well.

Profile Statistics:

This should be familiar to the MySpace crowd. You have a counter that shows you how many people have visited your site, and you have the option to reset that counter at any time. I didn't find it particularly useful to me when using MySpace, but with Facebook, I believe it could be a useful tool.

If Facebook developers wanted to go for bonus points, they could add in a simple graph to show you your daily, monthly, and yearly viewing statistics; yes, I am a statistics freak. If they happened to match the quality of Socialistics, I would be very impressed. These are features that I would appreciate.

Last Words:

Most of these suggestions would be easy to implement. It does not take a rocket scientist to come up with these ideas. Privacy controls would certainly be the winner for me; however, any of the other improvements that I listed are great ways to further improve Facebook for the future.

Check out Tech In Demand's Top 8 Facebook Applications.