Facebook Applications That Should Die

Scrabulous

Ah, it seemed so glorious at first, didn't it? Playing a cheap Scrabble knock-off with your friends — the perfect way to waste some time at work and reconnect with that buddy you haven't spoken to in years. How could it go wrong? Well, two weeks later when you're still tinkering away at that unfinished board, the burgeoning joy has been replaced with a strange combination of exhaustion and competitiveness — a cutthroat need to just... get... that... x... on... the... triple... word... score... The game is not only surprisingly stressful (after all, you don't want your long lost friend from summer camp to think you're a moron with words), but it's also NEVER ENDING. You can try to hide from it, but after about three days of giving Scrabulous the cold shoulder, it has the audacity to "nudge" you like an annoying telemarketer, making you feel both guilty and peeved. The worst part of all, however, is that just when you've finally come to the end of your Scrabulous adventure, here comes another invitation from some wide-eyed newbie who has yet to discover the arduous demands of the game. Of course, you can't say no, otherwise you'll seem like either a snob or an idiot with bad vocab skills. And so the cycle begins anew. It's like reaching the top of Mt. Everest and discovering that oh wait, there's another Mt. Everest on top of Mt. Everest, and you have to climb it too. Painful.

Oregon Trail

To be fair, I haven't actually played this one, but I believe I'm now in about 3.4 million wagons simultaneously trekking their way across the virtual Wild West. That's because I seem to get two or three Oregon Trail invitations a day, asking me if I'd like to join someone's soon-to-be-departing party. I feel bad saying no because who am I to imperil someone else's attempt at pixelated Manifest Destiny by withholding my much sought-after presence? But that being said, the sheer volume of requests makes me think that maybe these aren't sincere invitations. Maybe my pioneer skills and talents aren't hot commodities after all. Maybe this application is just forcing players to invite as many people as possible in order to merely hit the trail. Whatever the reason, it's generating entirely way too many application requests — bordering on spam — and AND AND I just went to my profile right now and found out that without my assent I am apparently spearheading a wagon down the trail! That's right, without doing anything, the Oregon Trail just invited three of my friends to play with me. That's a bit invasive, yes? And for that, the Oregon Trail, despite good intentions and a fun concept, deserves to die of dysentery.

Ack! I died! And before I got to see Juno!!!

Moving on...

The Lotto

The Lotto doesn't really do much. It purports to be some sort of jackpot service where every day, $50 worth of prizes are given out (sustained by advertising, they claim). Who knows if people actually win or not. That's not really the point. What's bad about The Lotto is that it surreptitiously sends invitations to all your friends as if you are so madly in love with this application that they too must join in the fun. At The Lotto's height of popularity, I would receive at least five to seven invites a day, which pretty much drove me nuts, especially since once I downloaded the program, I learned that it wanted me to reduce my privacy settings AND move the application to the top of the webpage. What the? Spammy AND demanding? I think not.

Send Hotness

This application bugs me because like The Lotto and The Oregon Trail, it generates entirely too much invite-spam for me to handle. First it alerts you that you've been considered hot. But how hot? In order to find that out, you have to invite what feels like half your friend list, thus making you a knowing accomplice to Facebook clutter for the sake of your own vanity. Of course, you do it anyway because who the hell cares about friends when your hotness is on the line? The payoff, however, isn't worth it. The hotness rankings seem to make no sense, and they're entirely too easy to manipulate. I shot my friend up to the top of the list by sending her three doses of hotness. Aren't we supposed to work harder than that for hotness supremacy? The entire application feels shoddy and lame, and in the end, you don't feel hot; you just feel had. And that, if anything, is COLD.

The Brain Game

The Brain Game is one of the great cockteases of Facebook. It seems to promise a whole litany of brain teasers, all with the goal of determining if we use our right or left brained more. However, it really only has one trick up its sleeve, and while it's moderately cool, it's short lived. The application has you study at a mysterious dancer endlessly pirouetting, and when you've stared long enough, you're asked to declare whether she was spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise. Based on your answer, the application announces what side of the brain you use the most, and that, my friends, constitutes the entire lifespan of The Brain Game. That's right. There's nothing more. No daily logic problems or optical illusions. No puzzles or IQ tests. Just a spinning woman. It actually takes more time to install and uninstall The Brain Game than it does to milk it for all its usefulness.

Multiple Walls

I Love Cupcakes

I love cupcakes, but I hate I Love Cupcakes. Why? Well, it's simple. IT DOESN'T WORK. Try as you may, you simply cannot send cupcakes with I Love Cupcakes. Instead, what you get is a message saying, "Coming Soon: Send your friends cupcakes!" Huh? So what's the point of the application if it doesn't even send cupcakes? What are you supposed to do with it? Are you supposed to simply sit there and marinate in cupcake appreciation? Or is it some strange commitment to cupcake devotion —  as if to say, "I love cupcakes so much, I downloaded a useless application in their honor. AND THAT MAKES ME PROUD." Nevertheless, I Love Cupcakes is exemplary of many, many Facebook applications that simply do not work and therefore should die.

And now last but very certainly not least:

Pirates/Ninjas/Zombies/Werewolfs/Slayers/Vampires

These are just awful. They don't really make any sense, and they're kind of ugly in profiles. Unlike all the other applications I've listed, these fantasy/horror/fanboy apps show no sign of abating in the popularity department. They keep coming back again and again and again. Hey, if you love vampires or zombies or whatever, more power to you. Seriously, it's fine. But for the rest of us, they're just... THE WORST. And unlike other applications, I actually feel bad when I turn down someone's zombie or ninja invite. I don't know why. It's like, they obviously think it's cool and fun, which again is fine for them, but I simply don't want it on my page, and when I reject it, I feel like I'm rejecting my friend's concept of coolness, which is hurtful, and I don't mean it like that, but, well, I just can't in good conscience put a box devoted to werewolves on my profile. I've tried. It's just not happening. So you see, any application that summons this sort of guilt and conflict has no place on Facebook. Put a stake through this one.

Do you agree or disagree with my list? What are your least favorite Facebook Apps? Do all my friends hate me now? Oh, and feel free to post this on Facebook. It'll be very meta.