You have been bitten by a vampire, so and so’s added some innocuous application that you really could care less about, add this application to spam and alienate the few friends that you have left. This is just a sample of the garbage that now populates the Facebook mini-feed (cynicism aside of course). What was a once a rather gratifying exercise in voyeurism has now turned into a something resembling a flea market escapade. Then there’s the wall which went from elegant simplicity to becoming the equivalent of an elementary school art project and the mini-feed, which is now full of mostly junk interspersed with the occasional treasure of friend related gossip.

Facebook now resembles the preverbal high school party to which one invites a few friends and ends up hosting the entire school and then being left with the cleanup the following morning. Gone is the neo modern facade and the clean interface, hijacked instead by a throng of applications which are nothing but glorified billboards waging a battle for eyeballs. Walls now resemble teenage bedrooms plastered with posters and littered with the remnants of countless fast food excursions. Not to mention the painstaking process of weeding through invitations to add all manner of useless applications.

While I can sympathize with Facebook’s aim to create an open and accessible platform there is still something to be said for the value of editing. Even the crassest of reality shows are shaped by countless hours of editing which gives them at least some semblance of narrative. In the same way that not all hours of reality television are made equal, not all applications are made equal. Allowing all manner of sub par applications unfettered access to Facebook has just resulted in more noise and less signal. The situation is becoming eerily reminiscent of Peguin’s ill fated wiki novel, proving the old adage yet again, that too many cooks do indeed spoil the broth.

Facebook really needs to get back to it’s core, which lies in aiding people to beter engage one another. It should continue to move in the direction of being a true social OS. That, however, will require the promotion of real and valuable interactions among users. After all, Facebook is in essence simply one big conversation and the value of participating in that really depends on the signal-to-noise ratio.

It appears I’m not alone in thinking this either, David, on his blog calls this phenomenon Spamturitis.