Is it just me or are others being bombarded with gratuitous notifications in their Facebook account? The immediate benefit to me of Facebook has always been the ability to keep abreast of what the people in my wider social group are up to. For my close friends and family, even though I have links to them, I am generally up to date on what is happening in their lives. Its those people that I have some level of friendship with, but that I may not talk to regularly that Facebook helps me keep in touch with.
Recently the amount of "useless" information has started to overwhelm the meaningful. My front page is full of 'invites' to become a werewolf, or to answer a quiz, or to find out my IQ. I accept that the price of using the site is exposure to the advertising, but the open slather that is occurring with applications on Facebook is creating so much noise in the feed that I am going there less and less. Following some of these links to see what was going on I realised what the problem is. A lot of these applications allow you use them without any commitment apart from installing the app to your page which can be easily reversed. After you have completed the personality test, or answered the quiz you are then presented with a request to send a notification of the app to a number of your friends before you can see the results.
This poses an interesting conundrum to the user. After having spent a segment of their time interacting with the app they are then prevented at the end from enjoying the results of that effort. That is unless they agree to spam their friends. Sending a single notification to a few people does not seem like such a bad trade off in return for getting the results of the application you have just spent time on. This is a prisoners dilemma in large scale. All of us would be better off in the long run if no-one was sending these useless notifications. In the short run though each individual faces a situation where they would be marginally better off if they send 'just one' set of spam notifications in return for an immediate return on effort.
As this is actually a repeated game prisoners dilemma, in which case the possibility of others taking retributive action in future games (sending spam back to us) should keep us from taking short term self serving actions. This is a fancy economist's way of saying that social conventions keep us in line. In this sort of precarious situation though, it is easy for this system to break down. There is always a segment of a population that either doesn't recognise the situation or doesn't care. Things then have a tendency to snowball, the more useless notifications we receive, the lower the social stigma is of sending our own notifications out.
My facebook page would suggest that we are getting to this stage now, where for at least a subset of users there is no stigma to sending out multiple application notifications to all their friends. It is by no means all of my friends that engage in this, but the set that do flood my inbox. I tend not to look at any of the notifications from those friends.
For the application developers, forcing people to send invites to their friends to use their product probably seemed like a good idea to get their application spread across the Facebook user base. In reality they end up missing the mark. The community splits themselves in two. The people that don't like to spam their friends choose not to get the applications payoff and delete the app. The developer has then lost a promotional chance and a user. The other user readily spams their friends but are likely to be the type of person that has most of their notifications ignored. I find it hard to take any pity on them.
If the informal social convention to stop this is truly breaking down, Facebook should consider formalising it. This should not have to come to a rule, but a statement of what is considered good behavior can inform people that might not quite get it. It can also send a message to developers about what is expected of them. This type of message also carries an implicit threat that continued flouting of convention could bring more extreme measures.
For now I'll stick with my reduced use of Facebook and trust that this is potentially just a transitory situation. If things continue to slide though I may need to readjust my position. Are you seeing the same thing?
