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Author Topic: Subtle Facebook tricks  (Read 2385 times)

superboyac

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Subtle Facebook tricks
« on: December 10, 2010, 04:04 PM »
Since I'm studying, I am getting distracted by things that normally wouldn't distract me ;D.  You know how it goes, anything but studying...

Anyway, I decided to visit my seldom visited facebook profile.  My only purpose is to go there and clean things up and play around with this thing that everyone loves.  So, I went to remove as many applications as possible.  Check this out: facebook does the maximum number of prompts and dialogs to remove an application.  Why?  because they really don't want you to.  Remember people, whenever software makes it hard to do something, it's usually because they don't want you to do it, but they can't come out and just say that.  So here is what happens:
I want to remove an applications like Poke, or whatever weird thing it is.  If you hover the mouse over the application name in the list, an "x" appears which means remove the application.  When you click it, it (of course) asks you if you really want to do this with a Yes/No dialog.  So I say yes, of course.  Then, ANOTHER dialog pops up saying the application was removed with an "okay" button to remove it.

So let's think about this.  It takes 3 clicks to remove the application.  I had about 7 applications, so it took 21 clicks to remove them all.  This is intentional.  of course facebook doesn't want you removing these things because these useless time wasters are the heart of their system.  So they make it as annoying as possible, under the guise that they are "protecting" from accidentally deleting very important things that you need.

Eóin

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Re: Subtle Facebook tricks
« Reply #1 on: December 10, 2010, 04:34 PM »
Once to request a delete and once to confirm is about the bare minimum you'd expect. The third prompt is probably redundant but doesn't seem that insidious.

Don't get me wrong, Facebook definitely do not want you to remove applications, but there is an awful worse going on in how they erode your privacy settings.

lanux128

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Re: Subtle Facebook tricks
« Reply #2 on: December 10, 2010, 08:30 PM »
it's facebook, whadya expect? they have to make sure that the people do understand what they want/asking for - hence the triple click.. ;D