So I’m minding my own business, and I get a call from my daughter, who wants me to look at her Facebook page. I do, and what do I find, but some friend of hers has sent her a “Best Friend Quiz” (twice), asking the questions ‘Is she smart?’ and ‘do you think she takes drugs.’

Pause with me whilst I do a slow boil.

My kid on drugs? Nope. Never. This is a newly-12-year-old that is pure as the driven snow. She won’t take so much as a Tylenol without parental permission. So, naturally, I suspect it’s a ‘friend’ pranking her. Nope. Guess again. I went ahead and clicked on the supposed “quiz” to find out that it’s one of these Facebook games, that you must agree to install on your own home page before you can play.

Newsflash, people: This is SPAM. Opt-in SPAM, mind you. But it’s still SPAM.

From what I was able to gather, this thing attaches itself to your account like some sort of parasitical beast with tentacles that would make H.P. Lovecraft proud. It immediately begins with a question about the person who’s unfortunate enough to have this waste of electrons stuck on their wall, but then moves on to EVERY OTHER ENTRY IN YOUR OWN FRIENDS LIST.

Let’s recap…you try and take a quiz. You must opt-in and allow it to infect your own account, just to take the quiz on someone else’s page. It then starts asking you a question for each one of your friends in your directory. It then sends out the quiz to each of THEIR pages.

I’ve seen pandemics that were less effective and efficient in spreading their viruses than this thing.

So how do the fine folks that make this train wreck of an app make money? I don’t know. I suspect, it’s because they are building one big honkin’ database of suckers…er em…USERS…that have voluntarily put this thing on their home page. If not, perhaps they are the type that just wanna watch the e-world burn. I dunno. But I do know that Facebook is allowing these things to multiply like so much electronic Kudzu. Sooner or later, these apps will hit critical mass, and your Facebook page will be one impenetrable mass of SPAM, cleverly disguised as games, applications, quizzes and the like. At that point, Facebook will effectively jump the shark, and we’ll all move onto the Next Big Thing in social networking.

Facebook needs to change the way these things work, and they need to do it now. Forcing someone to opt in just to figure out they don’t want whatever the app is selling is bass-ackwards. Worse, apps like these are set up to annoy more so that entertain or educate. And most users will not differentiate between Facebook and the crap that ends up on Facebook, no matter how earnest the disclaimer.

Then again, if past actions are any indication, Facebook never met a boneheaded move they didn’t fall all over themselves to try.