Monkeynotions

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a panel for Web 2.0 Expo, Facebook Marketing Best Practices. Jeremiah posed the question:

What is with these useless apps? Many people don’t get them, yet they are wildly popular.

I’ve heard this question a lot about these apps come mainly from adults and pundits of the social media space. However, the latest graphs from flowing data suggests that these applications by far are the most popular.

1. Pandering to the Masses.
One explanation is pandering to the masses. We may not understand the popularity of people reality TV, and we dismiss it as pandering to the masses. It’s what sells and what people like.

2. Generational differences.
It’s the classic case of “parents just don’t understand”. While the older population on Facebook continues to grow, it is still more populated by high school and college students. These silly apps are really for those kids and not adults. In fact, it’s the adults that are really asking these questions.

3. Facebook is a place for friends
The number one reason why I hear how people use Facebook, it is to “keep in touch with friends”. If people are coming to “hang out” and talk with their friends, the silly apps offer a way for them to casually hang out with one another. In the offline world, people rarely get together with their friends to execute a search, schedule a meeting, “network”, or sit around and get recommendations. While those things do occur when hanging out with friends, it is usually a secondary reason as to why you are hanging out with your friends.

4. Inherent Viral Co-efficient is Low for Utility Apps
A very well-written reason is that the inherent viral co-efficient for utility apps are just not as good as these “useless” or “silly apps”. Utility apps are rarely viral, particularly when layered on a platform. These apps all become very advanced for achieving some simple goals, as the platform is itself a communication utility tool.

5. Silly Apps Offer More than a Binary Interaction with Friends
We all get friend requests that are very binary: “Are you my friend or not” . In the offline world, our interactions with one another are less binary and more casual. There are tiny nuances such as body language and tone of voice that allow for more casual or double meaning of things. “Poking” was the first casual form that allowed people to interact outside of the binary,rigidness of “friending”. Poking is full of double meaning and is a way to interact, but not really. It has perfected the art of “passive aggression” online. The silly apps mimic the casual interaction that is present in human analog interaction.

I think that useless apps are here to stay, and if you take a closer look they aren’t all that useless when they are allowing more nuanced interaction than the common digital binary interaction rudimentary in online social networks.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under web2.0, social networks, social media, facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.