Facebook is the breeding ground at the moment for the applications that seem to be appearing out of thin air. It is the best means of advertising that an app maker could have ever dreamed of (except the case it were to be Microsoft) and the best way to make yourself noticed by some of the bigger guys in the game.

Sadly for them, the Palo Alto based company has decided to ad a profile clean-up tool that will allow users to hide the applications in question. This comes after the massive wave of complaints about apps on user profile pages that made them look clustered and downright annoying. However, Facebook's Julie Zhuo underlined that her company "will recommend that [users] keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added." Every profile will then be added a link at the bottom to "Show Extended Profile" that will more or less bring the old look back, including the showing of all the applications a user has been running.

The tool is compared to the way a "computer's desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons". I'm not sure that a Windows comparison was the best way to go about it (FB you're not there yet, ok? Quit it!), but indeed it would be the closest thing familiar with its users.

Of course, if the users that have their profiles filled with apps haven't taken the two seconds to un-check the default checked boxes that made everything come to be the way it is, it's not likely that many of them will use the profile clean-up now available, for the simple reason that they probably do not care about the whole deal a lot. Useful to users, a plague for apps developers, that's the best description.