Facebook Apps - HOT or NOT?

It seems like in every conversation I have with friends these days, "Facebook" comes up a lot. Whether they like it or hate it, everyone seems to be on it. I have noticed though that the tone of negative comments is increasing, especially in the last 2 months. 

  Of course, the one thing that is annoying everyone is the Applications; being inundated with requests from others about things you really dont care to know. What bubblegum flavour are you? After knowing what kind of drug I am, what rainbow color I am, and which "Friends" character I am, do I really want to know the bubblegum flavour that matches my personality the most? 

 Most of these apps make you take the test and then ask you to forward it to 20 friends to know the result. I say, call their bluff. Don't forward it and go back to the application. You will know what color your heart is. Take the next quiz if you have to, do them all. Just this time no one else needs to know about it. Trust me, you would be doing yourself and your friends a big favour. I thought these applications were targeted to the hip and cool Gen Y or the Millennial Generation (seriously, do they know how much power they hold over making or breaking Web 2.0 companies). 

But at the Ad.Tech Conference in San Francisco this past week, I heard a panel of teens complain about all the silly apps on Facebook. They all had left MySpace for Facebook as MySpace has become over-saturated with advertisements and solicitations. And now the overflow of apps. While you want to keep an open platform so that anyone and everyone can build an app for Facebook, how do you do quality control so that it doesn't destroy your users' experience? 

Like Facebook, I would be struggling with this dilemma. There may be a switching cost, but it is not high enough to warrant annoyance. And if Flickr could find a way to share and interface with these social networking sites (I upload my photos on Flickr and they are available on Facebook (and other sites) so that I can tag my friends, etc), it would be golden! And that would lower the switching costs for Facebook significantly and put Flickr under the category "the web 2.0 site you could not live without".