Perhaps they are.

I guess it all depends on how you view it, but from the direction I’m looking, some of these new Facebook apps do nothing for the Facebook experience itself. In fact, all they do is market an outside product or service.

Take the Free Unmetered Host application for example. The “application” is explained like this.

Welcome to FreeUnmeteredHost.com

We offer free UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH hosting with 12 gigabytes of disk space. There are no hosting fees, bandwidth usage fees, overage fees or hidden fees.

Our network is BGP enabled and consists of a variety of backbone providers, each providing connectivity that means you have the fastest most reliable service.

» 12GB Disk Space
» UNLIMITED! Bandwidth
» PHP 5 Support
» mySQL databases
» 100mb per second
» Instant activation
» Domain Name Support
» Easy to use WYSIWYG editor
» File Manager
» 24/7 Technical Support
» Full FTP Access
» name.freemeteredhost.com
» 99.9% Uptime

Here is a screenshot in case you don’t feel like visiting the actual page.

I’ve sent a message to a member who had apparently tried to use it, and got an intriguing response.

Hi Eric,

When I initially tried the application I honestly had no idea how it would work. I just wanted to see if the free hosting part was valid. After I installed the application, a banner ad started appearing on my profile page.

That’s not exactly what I had in mind, so I got rid of the application and that was that.

Sorry I couldn’t help.

-XXXXX

Sounds like this app is nothing more than a marketing scheme set up by Free Unmetered Host.

If this is the case, couldn’t it been seen as abuse of Facebook, the FB community, and everything the site represents? Or am I looking at this from the wrong angle?