Lately I have been trying to clean up my Facebook profile. Lately do I realize there are options to hide certain applications. I’ve always been adding new applications as they are sent, until one day a few months back I become really tired of going through this process each time one comes about. At the same time it floods my profile and makes it extraordinary hard to load and navigate. A lot of them turn out to be pretty mundane stuff that I don’t follow. And there are several embarrassing applications that has me alarmed. For instance, there’s this application called ‘Social Network’ that unwittingly came with some friend-ranking thing. On ‘Social Network’ there is an option that says, ‘Will you date me – Yes / No’. Initially I do not think much about it until not long ago I realize that people have been clicking on that thing. And there I go, ‘Oh hell, better get rid of this’ Because it makes me sound and look like some desperado! What you write on the Internet can possibly tell a hell lot about you – you are personifying yourself on cyberspace.

Despite using Facebook for about a year, I only discover ‘escape clauses’ recently. They are usually written in small print on some obscure part of the page. At the same time, prevention is better than cure: be cautious about what you accept.

Ironically, the necessity of survival for the creators and owners of these applications is contributing towards the spamming problem in Facebook. We often see messages: ‘(Sorry! Because our competitors are doing the same…) You need to pass this on to at least [x-number] of people / as many people as possible before you can ya-da-ya-da…’ And so there appears this unfortunate entire vicious cycle.