I really have 2 quarrels with this; the larger one is that it shouldn't be acceptable for the behavior to change so radically without reauthorizing these apps. There should have been a separate permission for "automatically post without my action" which was turned on, and then let people enable it if they want.
The second quarrel concerns the design of the page that you linked to. I just checked the link that you sent, and I had about 50 entries, about half of which I don't remember adding and absolutely all of them were "more than 6 months ago" (in reality, some of them were more than 4 years ago).
Using your link, it was multiple clicks with a ~5s delay in the middle to remove a single entry. If you click a second X without waiting for the first response to pop up and click ok, it doesn't visually remove the original thing you X'd meaning you can't just go through and click all the X's.
No way to remove multiple entries at once. To remove all of the entries that I don't want took me something like 5 minutes, which is completely absurd. I have always been in general opposed to facebook apps so the average recent college grad could easily have something on the order of several hundred of these entries.
For anyone who knows anything about UX, it is fairly obvious that the page was explicitly designed to prevent people from removing apps. It is depending on a "laziness" factor to get people to do things that they actively don't want to do, which is horrible. It appears to be deliberately only removing the entry when you click ok on a delayed dialog even when the client side is 100% is sure that the entry is removed (click X, click another X without waiting for the dialog, the first item X'd will stay in the list since you didn't wait for the confirmation). Either a huge UI bug or a deliberate and unethical UX decision.
My issue with facebook is not at all what features they have or what privacy settings they have. The issue is that they deliberately use underhanded tactics to get their users to do what they want them to do. In the past they would change your privacy settings without telling you, and in this case they are using a privacy setting that meant one thing in 2007 to mean something very much different in 2011.
People who aren't as technical as you and I won't even think to look for the page that you linked to to begin with. In fact, people who aren't as technical as you likely won't even realize that the reason that these stream posts are showing up is because they clicked some facebook button on a website 4 years ago.
Existing apps that have been authorized will need to be reauthorized to get any new permissions, so you need not worry about previous apps suddenly doing something that you previously did not agree to.
I'll let the guys who maintain that page know about your comments about the UI. I suspect the one-app-at-a-time design is a combination of:
a) simplicity of implementation due to less code and reuse of components,
b) simplicity of use in the common case (just removing a single app),
c) not expecting people to selectively want to delete a whole bunch of apps (although there is a single "disable all" link),
d) that the platform team wants to collect ratings on the applications when you remove them to reduce distribution of apps that people don't like (and to take corrective action on apps that get bad reviews).
People who see posts on their profile page and find them irritating can easily hide them, and an immediate option is to remove that application. Each post is attributed to the application that made them. I'd say a level of web savviness is required, but not "technical" ability.
> so you need not worry about previous apps suddenly doing something that you previously did not agree to.
Except that pretty much every single app requested permission to post as you, even though almost none of them actually did. I don't know if this was because they wanted to leave themselves open to add extra features, or if there were obscure features that posted as you, but everything from bumper sticker apps to WSJ apps had the permission to post as you. In very close to none of these apps did they actually post without you taking a specific action and answering a prompt saying that yes, you really do want a post. I absolutely do not want any app to be able to post as me under any circumstance, and I have apparently had dozens of apps with this permission so far without me even realizing.
Because there is (apparently) no permission "allow them to post after prompting me", "allow this app to post as me" is the defacto choice for the former. If I authorized netflix to post as me in 2007, and it 4 years pass without it posting as me, then it suddenly starts posting as me in 2011 without me taking any additional action that is a serious problem, and that is the situation as I understand it right now.
From what I understand, this is an entirely new permission and is part of the new "Add to Timeline" system. I don't work on that part of Facebook myself, but this is how it was described in the F8 introduction to the system.
The second quarrel concerns the design of the page that you linked to. I just checked the link that you sent, and I had about 50 entries, about half of which I don't remember adding and absolutely all of them were "more than 6 months ago" (in reality, some of them were more than 4 years ago).
Using your link, it was multiple clicks with a ~5s delay in the middle to remove a single entry. If you click a second X without waiting for the first response to pop up and click ok, it doesn't visually remove the original thing you X'd meaning you can't just go through and click all the X's.
No way to remove multiple entries at once. To remove all of the entries that I don't want took me something like 5 minutes, which is completely absurd. I have always been in general opposed to facebook apps so the average recent college grad could easily have something on the order of several hundred of these entries.
For anyone who knows anything about UX, it is fairly obvious that the page was explicitly designed to prevent people from removing apps. It is depending on a "laziness" factor to get people to do things that they actively don't want to do, which is horrible. It appears to be deliberately only removing the entry when you click ok on a delayed dialog even when the client side is 100% is sure that the entry is removed (click X, click another X without waiting for the dialog, the first item X'd will stay in the list since you didn't wait for the confirmation). Either a huge UI bug or a deliberate and unethical UX decision.
My issue with facebook is not at all what features they have or what privacy settings they have. The issue is that they deliberately use underhanded tactics to get their users to do what they want them to do. In the past they would change your privacy settings without telling you, and in this case they are using a privacy setting that meant one thing in 2007 to mean something very much different in 2011.
People who aren't as technical as you and I won't even think to look for the page that you linked to to begin with. In fact, people who aren't as technical as you likely won't even realize that the reason that these stream posts are showing up is because they clicked some facebook button on a website 4 years ago.