This is how I solved Facebook's over sharing problem: I don't use Facebook apps. If I need to, such as for business, I run it through a dummy account.

Had Facebook taken the path of not fucking around with privacy settings, I might be more open to Facebook's apps. However their intentions are clear, given events such as: automatically opting in to new email alerts even through I've disabled all other Facebook e-mail alerts, continually changing the privacy settings page resulting in the removal of past privacy options, allowing "friends" to add me to groups I wish to be no part of, un-hiding comments to my page which I have marked as either spam or offensive, and so on.

The end result is a Facebook which I use to look at photos and tell girls to Skype me and not much else. While I may notice these things right as they happen, for other non-technical users their happiness with Facebook slowly erodes away and they can't quite pin point it.

As Facebook continues to add more and more "noise", the chances of a competitor being able to beat Facebook at their own game increases.

While the analogy may be overused, albeit in a different manner, Google was able to beat Yahoo not only because it was a better search engine but because it had a lot less noise. While Facebook appears to be the Google of social networking, the sheer amount of "noise" in my news feed tells me otherwise.

(A note for users of both Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, etc: the amount of "noise" you produce is directly relational to how much people whose ideas matter pay attention to you. The friends who are over sharing get blocked from my Facebook news feed. The Twitter users that tweet about their cat grooming habits are un-followed. And so on. I am extremely cautious what gets posted to my feed, and when it does, people remember what I posted.)

Yep, me too. Those SocialCam videos are so enticing! I click but when prompted to install I resist.

It's so f'ing annoying that you can't even follow a link (like anything on Yahoo) without installing the app. I just do a separate Google search for the story title instead of installing the app. At some point there is less sharing going on. I'm more likely NOT to check out what my friend read because of this.

Publishing on the user stream is, afaik, an extended permission. Facebook asks (for Timeline users) if you want to give the application these supplementary permissions, and you can disable these one by one. But the application will ask for these permissions every time you use it.

I blocked Deezer from sharing my music, and the website pop a little message every time i launch a song, asking "Do you want to share on your timeline"

Source : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...

I do know (personal experience) that some applications refuse to work properly if you don't grant them every bit of access they request. Even if that access is not fundamental to the operation of the application.

The example I speak of is Digsby. I saw some of my friends had postings from Digsby on their wall, with "achievements" like sending 100,000 messages etc. I didn't want that, so when I installed Digsby I unchecked that option. Consequence: Digsby would randomly boot me out of Facebook Chat and not allow me to log back in. I had to remove it from my Facebook apps list, re-login, and turn off wall postings within the Digsby app itself rather than Facebook's permission management.

That's the kind of thing that irritates me.

When it asks for permision there is a spot for who can see the posts. I always choose "Only Me" and I deselect the post to timeline request as much as possible.