Will apps kill Facebook?

I am one of many people that I suspect have abandoned Myspace in favour of Facebook in recent years. I never enjoyed using Myspace and didn’t see the point of it. I had to set up email alerts to remind me to visit and reject friends requests from porn sites and the like. The most painful thing about Myspace was visiting the pages of people who had stuck every conceiveable widget and slideshow on their page accompanied by some form of auto play god awful music. The vast majority of Myspace pages wouldn’t render properly in any browser.

Facebook’s interface on the other hand is clean and easy to use. The news feeds on each page suck you in and assist you in wasting too much time following what people are up to. You know that when you click on something that it will work. At least until now.

Since Facebook opened up their API there has been an explosion of applications. Some such as the Twitter and Last.fm apps are very good. Others a very bad for a variety of reasons. Some such as the ’super wall’ and the like risk turning facebook into Myspace. Now when you visit a person’s profile you can’t expect to see a clean, well laid out page, but often a hodge podge of crap. Not to mention the incessant invitations to determine your sex appeal score or to rate whose dog is cuter than the other.

Basically I hate them. While I think Facebook did the right thing by opening up, there should have been some form of quality control process. Apps should have to be vetted before they can make it onto the site. Otherwise the user experience will, and is suffering.

Does anyone agree or am I just a big whinger?

Update: I’m not the only one who is concerned

Screenshot from Mashable.com