Social network sites are popular among Internet users today. Using social network profiles, users establish a network with their contacts, such as friends, alumni, company, political parties, family or even just to make friends. Friendster is perhaps the most popular social network site in Malaysia and South East Asia. Catching up on popularity is Facebook.

While I just joined Facebook recently, I have been a Friendster user since 4 years ago. One of the new features of Friendster, which is also available in Facebook is the ability to add applications in profiles. Applications range from games, horoscope, music, video, etc.

The applications serve to spice up a member’s profile by providing members a with choices to integrate interesting content in his profile. However, with more and more applications being developed, more and more users add lots of applications in their profile. And, this resulted in slow loading of profiles and at time caused web browser to get into a not responding status.

Well, many of these applications load images and animation, some to the extent of having sound and video, causing a pollution of multimedia contents in a profile.

To make matter worse, the ability to post animated greetings as Friendster comments would not do any good. A relief is that Friendster does provide the safe mode settings to disable the customization of profile layout but it does not work with the applications.

Friendster and Facebook as well as other social network sites should look into this and take necessary steps to prevent pollution of multimedia contents, in particular the applications.