I have been going for a few months to the Facebook developers garage where developers, entrepreneurs and companies gather for one evening a month to learn / discuss / think about facebook applications.

One of the trend discussed this month is that Facebook users seem to have enough of most of those applications that came up since the facebook API was open to developers. A poll was started live during the event, asking Facebook users what they think the application are useful for. The results are quite strong, and show that almost 90% of users do not see any real use for them.

Other signs are the multiple Facebook groups and petitions joined by thousands such as the "ban the inviting of friends on applications", almost a million user at the time of writing, the " ban apps that force to invite before you can use them" etc.

Well, the good thing is that the Facebook people are listening to those complaints. The layout keeps on changing so people can have a clean homepage not filled with dozens of apps anymore (there's a new layout coming up soon too). We also learnt yesterday that it will soon be forbidden to force people to invite their friends in order to use an application.

This is one step to the right direction, but I think that the most important task is for us, developers, to build interesting and useful applications, as most users are not interested anymore in using them just because it's new. This time's over

I reckon we should see in this phase 2 some very interesting applications, and I can't wait to develop some myself!

On a funny note, for those who have not seen it yet, this video illustrates perfectly this post (and my girl friend will be happy as she's in the video ;-) ).

Labels: facebook, facebook application, trend