Somewhere, somehow, Facebook started evolving into something that wasn’t very desirable. You knew MySpace was going downhill when you logged on one day and saw that you had a friend request from a bottle of Pepsi, or a can of Axe deodorant. With Facebook, it was logging on one day and seeing your mom, and your mom’s friends, trying to become your friend that may have signaled something weird was happening. For others it was the Facebook applications that sprang out of nowhere and quickly turned people’s profiles back into the hideous malformed websites that we all used to remember as MySpace profiles. For me, it was the realization that I was interacting with all my friends in a highly efficient manner that made it just as easy to see what my best friend was doing, as someone who I don’t even talk to, yet accepted their friend request anyway as a gesture of good will.

I never quite 'got' Facebook. I still don't.
I think the UI is overly complicated, thus the UX is horrible. I spend most of my time there (which amounts to 10 minutes every two weeks) trying to figure out what goes where, why is that there, where are the settings for that, are there even any settings for that...

To me, it's confusing.

Yet to 'normal people', you know, the people who haven't ever heard of Jaiku, it seems to work. I have seen numerous friends of mine who normally "visit" the web maybe 10 minutes a month spend hours a day on Facebook.

And watching what they do, I believe the strength of Facebook for the average person is in photos. The ease of use (in that respect only!), the tagging of people... And people (apparently) very much enjoy peeking into other people's lives via photographs.

It's like that real-life fascination with being presented photo albums. I never, ever understood this, but I saw almost everyone around me quite enjoy the experience.

It could still have been a place for me to hang out. In time, I would have got past all the UI quirks, and maybe I would have enjoyed some good conversations over there, especially since it's a lot better at handling those than the media darling Twitter. But good conversations can't take place there.

Because the thing that started Facebook's transformation into something that wasn't very desirable is, in my opinion, apps.

They're silly, useless time wasters. And I don't think anyone actually enjoys them. Or at least I hope so. These start lowering the value of the overall experience, they might even soft-spam (I invented that right now!) your notifications area... it's all downhill from there.

It's a pity. I think Facebook would have been an interesting place to connect to less geeky friends. IF it had no apps.

But this is just my take. Read Stefan's, linked above, because it focuses on an entirely different perspective. Which is very interesting and worthy of a read.