What's in it for me? Oh, nothing. Awesome.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's time to do what I do best:

Complain about crap.

The target: A Profile Tracker application on FaceBook.

Not because it actually does all sorts of horrible tracking gubbins - oh no. I'm complaining because it doesn't actually do anything, save for attempting to con you into signing up to - shock horror - more crap.

Allow me to elucidate, or maybe I'll just put a bunch of screenshots up and rant. That works too.

See, a few people mailed me about this. The application in question presents itself as something that allows you to see who is visiting your profile and when over a period of time. There's a long, lengthy babble all about what it is and what it does, but judging from the comments the application has received, nobody has bothered to read it and consequently most people think this really works. It doesn't, as you'll see later (along with its true purpose). Here it is after it's installed:


Wow, look! It's SO awesome it can guess how many people visited my page yesterday - before I installed it! Or, as they say on their FAQ:

Profile Tracker deciphers Facebook traffic patterns and outputs results that are relevant and pertinent to individual profile owners. Based on network averages, we approximate how many views your profile receives a day. Based on who is highly active in your network and who has a profile with high similarity ratings to your own, we make conjectures regarding who is likely to have viewed your profile and at what time.

Are you results anything more than educated guesses? No. Applications are not allowed to track who actually views your profile, what time views occur, or how many views you get each day. Therefore, we must rely on sophisticated algorithms, similar to those Google uses to power search queries, in order to make generalizations based on the nature of your profile, your friend group, and Facebook generally. Our results can be surprisingly accurate, but they are nothing more than educated guesses and no one should view this application as anything more than a game.

......yeah, you need a pretty sophisticated algorithm to have a bar chart go TWELVETY, LOL.

In fact, if you bother to read down, things get even more bare faced:

Where can I find an application that actually keeps track of profile views and does more than just guessing?

These applications, much like unicorns and dragons, do not exist. However, Profile Tracker is the best guesser in the game.

......so there you have it, in black and white. It does nothing more than pull random, twelvety-style numbers out of the sky. On the bright side, they admit it. On the down side, they don't really get into the real point of this nonsense.

And that would be, Mr Ghost?

Go back up and check out the picture. Go on, I'll wait for you. In fact, if you can't be bothered, here it is again. The gimmick - if you can call it that - is all based around "Keys". If you want to see pictures of who is visiting your profile - sorry, let me rephrase that - if you want to see randomly selected pictures of people who probably died a week ago but still appear to be visiting your profile, then you have to collect keys. And how do we do that, then?


The plot thickens, probably with a sort of muddy brown colour. You have to invite FOUR people to get ONE key to open up a randomly selected picture of someone (who died last week, probably). As you can imagine, that quickly adds up to a whole lot of people potentially touting this application.

We'll try and ignore the fact that once you've invited all your friends you can never get anymore keys, but ANYWAY.....all is not lost. You can, apparently, obtain magical Red keys. Red keys are supposed to be better than regular keys - not really sure why, they probably let you open up more pictures of pretend visitors.

How do you get these keys? Here it comes, kids....

Wha.....offers? Where? What?.....


BAMZO! And if Bamzo isn't a word, it is now.

Sign up to DVD offers! Diet patches! Ringtones and sports betting and Bingo and all the crap you can handle - some of which will probably cost you dough (and likely earn the application creator some cash in the process, of course).

As if you couldn't have guessed, the whole thing is exposed as nothing much more than a barefaced attempt to pull in affiliate wonga. Worse, there are a lot of people complaining that they signed up to deals touting Red keys and still haven't received any or they're having problems using them (I think their biggest problem is signing up to stupid deals for pretend keys that don't actually do very much but never mind). You can see a not-so-fun wall here (assuming you have a Facebook account), where you can listen to lots of people say how bad this application is. Random example:


.....that's one of the better ones.

Of course, if you scroll down to the bottom of the first page of this application, everything is (finally) revealed for the nonsense it is:



Oh, interesting. No mentions of "sophisticated algorithms similar to Google" anymore - I guess they probably know nobody is going to scroll right down to the bottom.

The lesson here, then, is that bottoms are awesome.

And that this application, sadly, isn't. Sure, it does label itself as throwaway and disposable - eventually, for anyone that can be bothered wading through reams of guff about patterns and algorithms - but for those that remember the old arguments about value propositions and content value, this just seems like something based on Ye Olde Adware model of "take everything, give nothing back in return".

Take my advice - save your time, effort and (more importantly) money and steer clear of applications like this that want nothing other than for you to throw money at crap.