It started with MySpace. It was a place to connect, find new music, and chat with friends. Sure, it was a little congested with traffic at time, some people had too many glitter graphics and unicorns on their profile pages, and lots of bad bands asked to be your friend (they are trying so hard), but it was still a very good resource for connecting.
Then came the advertisers. They brought their ringtones, click-on-me advertisements, and spam messages. Many MySpacers got tired quickly with signing on only to find countless porn friend requests and endless messages that they could care less about.
Then we move over to Facebook. It was so clean and basic. We could learn about our classmate's favorite movies ot reconnect with our friends we said we would never forget after high school (but did). It was so real. Minimal advertising, no spam, and no unwanted messages from unknown people (save a few stalkers you had forgotten from high school, but didn't forget you). Life was good again.
Then came open source Facebook. At first, it could be used for good. Maybe it would be nice to have a few new ways to connect? Lets add a way to draw a small note to a friend or add a little music player to show friends some new music (kind of like MySpace, but its is still clean, right?).
Open the doors to spammers, advertisers, and virus makers of the world. No, I do not want to play Oregon Trail on Facebook. No, I do not want to see which Desperate Housewives star I am most like. No, I do not want to post dozens of stupid bumper stickers all over my page. Just when we thought that the millions of useless profile applications flooding our profiles were bad enough, I received a message today that induced an eerie state of deja vu.
Facebook is clogged and they are cleaning up inactive accounts. You need to send this message to all your friends to prove your account is still active so they don't delete it." I got this message many times on MySpace from Tom. I also got a new post on my wall this week: "Dood, U gotta totally check out these new pix of u! lol. (link to a virus, that send same type of messages to all your friends)."
The new version of Facebook seems to have some gaping holes in the empire walls of security. Now that the fortress has been breached and the hoards are attacking, where will Facebook enthusiasts go next? Too bad the Facebook developers couldn't have seen this coming...oh wait...