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.)