So I have had an account on Facebook for about a year and a half now and it has been interesting seeing the changes the site has gone through. I first joined up through an invite from my ex-girlfriend, when the site was still invite-only and mainly used by college students over in the USA.

It’s only in the past 3 or 4 months that Facebook has become a bit of a craze in the UK, even making the national news on the BBC and getting businesses is in tizz about whether they should restrict access to it during work hours. There have also been articles in the papers about City workers who are trying to big themselves up amongst their peers and clients by ‘friending’ as many people as possible. Anyway bankers will always be bankers as they say, but that aside, I have been feeling of late that Facebook is becoming a little bloated.

Back in the day it was all about the wall, photos and messages. Whereas I dig some of the new functionality and the API and applications you can openly develop, I feel things are becoming a little over the top. When I go to some of my friends’ profiles I now have to scroll down quite a few screens just to see their wall, as they have installed super wall, fun wall and all number of pointless apps that appear in the interface before the standard wall.

The result of all these extra apps and functionality, in my opinion is actually reducing the usability and accessibility to some of the content, in the context of the profile. You know have almost an overload of widgets to contend with when looking at a profile, too much user choice and not enough screen real estate to fit everything in.

Another drawback of the apps and notifications associated with them is I am getting spammed with useless Facebook mail now. X is asking me to ‘be a Zombie’, Y is sending me ‘a beer’, Z wants to know my ‘top 10 breakfast cereals’, it is all becoming a little too much.

It is interesting from a user-group perspective, if you compare those that have used Facebook the longest, i.e. the college kids in the States, versus those over here in the UK, then you tend to find that the more mature user-group tends not to have bloated their profiles with all the superfluous crap that my friends here in the UK do, they keep the focus simple, the way I like it.

In my opinion they should revert some of this functionality and go back to the good old days and for me at least I think the user-experience would become more rewarding. So no more requests for ‘zombies versus pirates’ please people, it is boring and all a bit old hat, plus I don’t have the time for it.

Happy social networking!