Facebook is an amazing social tool, but the tragic flaw with it is that society is composed mainly of tools. This is why a number of extremely irritating trends have cropped up – trends which make you want to shut down your computer, go outside and take a deep breath. Now these trends have been documented in multiple places, but here’s my extremely short list of the Top 5:

1. Too many applications, too many people, not enough interest. I don’t care if you’re throwing sheep at me. I don’t care if you’re asking me what kind of unique and special snowflake I am. The worst thing about too many applications spamming me, is that the signal-to-noise ratio for genuinely interesting applications is really shitty – I hardly ever find anything worth adding, because I’m too busy ignoring other crap!
2. Too many friends, not enough Homescreen. Again, when you have a lot of friends, the signal-to-noise ratio gets insane. Facebook is pretty good at asking what you’re interested in, but clearly there’s a point beyond which this is not going to help. Also, there’s no permanent record either. If I can’t log in for a couple of days, there’s no way I can ‘page back’ to see what I missed. Not only is it an incomplete record, it’s also non-permanent. This is actually a feature problem, but it’s on a list of bad trends because it’s made worse by the trend of people posting random shit all the time (Of course, my random shit is someone else’s magnum opus – witness the fact that as  I hit submit on this entry it will automatically be cross-posted to FaceBook thanks to the wonder of RSS!)
3. Crap-tastic tags and forwards. Enough pixels have been spent criticizing these. My major concern is with how uncreative these things are. 25 things about you that no-one knows? Jeez, how LiveJournal of you. What’s next? A cute collection of cartoons that people can tag with their friends? Oh wait…
4. Inane status updates. Not much anyone can do about this, but god is it annoying. And Facebook loves it, of course, because omg, like, check those hitz out!
5. Incorrectly tagged photos. The whole point of tagging photos is so that people can find their own pics. This means, if someone’s in a photo, you tag them with their Facebook profile, so that everyone knows about it. Tagging photos (especially of people who have profiles) with random ‘funny’ inside-joke nicknames is not only against the philosophy of social networking (haha, look at me grandstanding about the philosophy of social networking – as if there is one!) but also just plain silly.

Submit your own! Comment on this post and let me know what you think are the most annoying Facebook trends…

Know what’s truly terrible? I posted this on Facebook (facepalm!) in 2008, and it’s still as relevant today.