Facebook Apps - Notifications, Clutter, and You

It's been in the news that Facebook is giving you tools to de-clutter your profile layout. Fine. (People who listen to the Linkspank blogs will recall that I was predicting this kind of thing a while ago.)

But the "clutter" of applications has been an issue for a few months and particularly with notifications.

Meanwhile, Linkspank is building its facebook app - The Real Version. In doing so, we've bumped up against the second issue: notifications.

Who can send a notification or email to whom within an app, and how? You'd think that's a pretty straightforward, important, basic question. Well, in fact this question has a non-straightforward, confusing, answer:

Holy crap.

(Note, it says confidential but at the page where I found it it appears to be pasted by the source.)

I give facebook a lot of credit for their willingness to take bold action to protect their user experience. The flip side is that the boldness has created that table. Wow.

People want to be able to play around and try games and applications. But they also want a simplified AND organized stream of communications. Not easy to do. This is part of why Linkspank is "sticking to its knitting" and will only build in features that touch the core idea and "ecosystem" at multiple points.

Anyway, regarding the facebook app, we'll be phasing it in starting on Monday hopefully.