Hope everybody had a good Memorial Day. If you live in the United States, that is. By some scheduling accident I spent part of it in a meeting with our Canadian marketing consultant, who doesn’t have any specific attachment to American holidays.

The weekend’s news brings that RockYou, maker of many an asinine Facebook app, has raised $1 million – when they were hoping to raise $70m at a $400m valuation. Matt Marshall at VentureBeat pins blame on “stormy changes in the market.” Sean P. Aune at Mashable just calls it “issues” and perhaps a “return to a more logical sensibility.” I call it fully expected.

I went to a conference a couple months ago, where two of the presentations were made by people from such a major Facebook-app-maker (I’ll spare the names to protect the egregiously guilty). And I’ll tell you what, it made me feel dirty.

The presentations didn’t include a discussion of the value of a social platform to build on, or the addition of utility to a purely social site. Or a single mention of the user experience, from any angle. It was all about the numbers. Cold, hard numbers.

I’ve always wanted to believe that business owners always mean well, that they always care about their users – these people did not. Their main concern was getting enough users installing the app to outpace the number of users uninstalling it each day. As long as they could trick enough people into signing up, and then spamming their friends, they were in good shape.

I can not overemphasize how literal I am being – these are the people that had a fit when Facebook stopped letting them require people to invite friends before they could add an application.

Let’s be clear: The Facebook Platform has problems, as I discussed in my previous post, but they’re not the only ones to blame. The other side of the coin is that the very few good apps are getting lost in the haystack of terrible ones, and it’s hurting everybody. Functionality is being scaled way back (functionality that could be useful), because the lame applications are spoiling it for everyone.