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It must be a stressful thing, being a social network in the age of ennui. How is a service like Facebook to stay one step ahead of users who have seen it all, teenagers waiting for new ways to differentiate themselves from their elders and newspaper columnists itching to declare things "over"?

Facebook's solution to this conundrum seemed as clever as it was trendy. Its big idea was that, instead of shouldering the burden of self-improvement alone, outside programmers would be allowed to add new features to Facebook. Facebook users, in turn, would be able to choose which of these free "applications" to add to their home pages.

Already, hundreds of "apps" have popped up. If you're on Facebook - and with two million Canadian users, the odds aren't bad - you've probably bumped into them already. A good number of them are junk, but others give the appearance of being truly useful.

For instance, an application called "Top Friends" that lets users single out a handful of Best Friends Forever from their contacts. Listen carefully, and you can hear the sound of egos getting pummelled across North America.

There's a "Graffiti Board" application that lets users doodle notes on their friends' home pages. There are little maps of the world that highlight the countries their owners have visited.

Meanwhile, the iRead application lets you showcase the books you've read and see what your friends are reading - kind of a miniature Amazon.com within Facebook. The "Catbook" and "Dogbook" applications let you create mini-Facebook profiles for the local bestiary. And the iLike application ingeniously mines the music preferences that you and your friends so helpfully plugged into Facebook when you signed up, pointing you toward local concerts and searching the Web for matching music videos.

Indeed, iLike proved to be one of the first applications to really take off, as literally millions of users added it to their accounts. And, by extension, it was also one of the first applications that disgruntled users started deleting en masse.

Why? As users quickly discovered, Facebook applications aren't everything they were cracked up to be. For one thing, users quickly discovered that if one of their friends had added an application - say, one of those Graffiti Boards - to their home page, anyone wishing to use it must first acquire a Graffiti Board application of their own.

Consider: If 20 friends each have a different application on their home page that you'd like to interact with, you must install all 20 applications on your own home page. Where does that leave your home page? Looking like a disaster, is where: covered in wingdings and maps and little clashing icons that are hardly ever used.

And on a social network, looks matter. A person's home page on Facebook, or any other network, is their front yard, their online homestead. People take pride in their yards, and fret over what's happening on their neighbours' lots, because, as it were, it affects property values.

It pays to remember that the success that Facebook has met with since it opened to the public comes largely at the expense of MySpace, its immediate predecessor in the "website that everybody absolutely must sign up to" bracket. MySpace's prodigious rise was marred by a media-fuelled panic over cyber-stalking, coupled with the site's gradual takeover by youth with appalling taste in graphic design.

That service gave its users the tools with which to customize their home pages, and they obliged, usually making them as ugly as imaginable. So when Facebook arrived, offering home pages with a simple, respectable look, it succeeded among a demographic for whom looking respectable matters.

As it happens, Danah Boyd, an American academic who researches social networks, drummed up global attention this week by postulating, on her blog, that the MySpace/Facebook divide among youth fell along class lines. Aesthetics, she argued, counted in this equation.

"That 'clean' or 'modern' look of Facebook," she wrote, "is akin to West Elm or Pottery Barn or any poshy Scandinavian design house."

Facebook, she says, appealed to "hegemonic" youth; people interested in getting ahead among the powers that be. MySpace, meanwhile, has become the preserve of communities that are marginalized by choice or circumstance, like immigrants, members of minorities and self-defined social outsiders.

It's a provocative argument, and it might help explain some of the complaining that has gone up on Facebook over the arrival of applications, and the mess they've left in their wake. "All these stupid applications are making Facebook into MySpace!" gripes one Facebook discussion group, which has garnered more than 500 members. Indeed, a quick search of Facebook yields more than 50 user-generated discussion groups with names like "I effing hate the new Facebook applications," "I hate these stupid Facebook apps," and "Hate is a bit strong, but I do dislike the Facebook Application frenzy."

It might just be grumbling from people who are resistant to change. At best, applications will create social strata within Facebook, further fragmenting it into subcultures according to which wingdings are in vogue with whom.

But it should also be a warning call to Facebook: By requiring users to gunk up their home pages to use its new applications, it risks losing the brand that set it apart. Its relative sobriety is part of its draw. Widgets and gadgets are fun, but their returns pale next to the value of keeping up appearances.

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NOTES FROM THE UNDERGROUND

Someecards, an e-card service with the slogan "When you care enough to hit send," offers the perfect response to people who send e-cards in lieu of something meaningful. Their library of satirical e-cards is a wonder: The "encouragement" section stocks cards like "I have no doubt you'll find and not appreciate love again soon," "When work feels overwhelming, remember that you're going to die," and "Someday I may add you as my Facebook friend."

GROUP THERAPY

In case we needed one, here's another experiment in anonymous collaboration. DoodleNow looks like an average paint program: Use your paintbrush to draw little doodles on a whiteboard. The catch: other people are doing the same thing, on the same whiteboard. It's completely anonymous, which, as always, brings out the best and worst in people. Sometimes the invisible scribblers build on each other's drawings; more often, they cover each other's drawings in obscenities and assorted phallic symbols. But don't let it deter you: Go ahead, draw a pony, see what happens.

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