Are you seeing the term “Facebook Fatigue” everywhere?

Jason Goldberg wrote a post today on Socialmedian talking about his descent into Facebook Fatigue. The “shiny new” effect of Facebook has worn off on him, and the core utility of the system is down to a few basic features of the network.

And importantly, he’s cut off his third-party app use:

I no longer use any of the 3rd party apps — I find most of them tiresome and annoying. The nature of most of these apps is that they are only successful if tons of people use them, which puts an adverse incentive on app makers to get app users to spam their friends with app invites and the such, which is just annoying.

It touches on a subject that was just in the comments on yesterday’s post: are developers shooting themselves in the foot with spammy tactics?

Undeniably yes.

The problem is that facebook user attention is a common property resource (oooh, econ term!), which means that if you play nice, everyone else can still play rough and they win in the short term. And if they play rough and everyone loses in the long term, at least they won in the short term (and you didn’t).

So the incentives here are all wrong. It’s the kind of thing that, if Facebook wants to control it—and judging by the reactions by their users in the blogosphere they might want to—it will have to be done top-down with restrictions.

I think it’s a little early for us to all be using the term “Facebook Fatigue.” I know I’ve used it twice in this post now, but I think we bloggers have a tendency to jump on things without thinking it through. This might be one of those things.

So some users are tired of applications. Goldberg admits that he uses Facebook regularly for things like messaging and photo sharing, which is no small thing.

Facebook isn’t jumping any sharks. It’s just growing up, and maybe not watching Happy Days as much as it used to.

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