| This article fails to consider the (possibly very legitimate) reasons why Facebook backed away from this. To me, the two biggest ones are: 1. As others have said, spammy apps hugely detracted from the experience of using Facebook. 2. I haven't seen this discussed elsewhere, but I think it's huge: Facebook apps were never allowed to serve dynamic content on people's profile pages. This significantly impaired how rich, useful, and "social" these apps could actually be. For example, I used to work for BillMonk, which was a way of tracking social, informal debt between friends. It should have been a perfect app for Facebook. But it wasn't possible for us to serve content in our widget that would give you up-to-date information about how much you owed a friend (or they owed you). You had to "push" your updates to this content, as I recall, but it wasn't technically feasible for us to push content updates to Facebook every time there was a change to our database. I think Facebook imposed this limitation very deliberately for a very good reason: if an app could serve dynamic content, it could also monitor how users were using Facebook. Someone could create a "stalker" app to tell you who was visiting your profile. If such a thing existing it would significantly deter people from using Facebook. You'd have to think before every click about the social implications of visiting the next page. It's an important part of Facebook's model that you can look at whatever you want without looking like a stalker. |