Facebook Apps: Fascinating and Boring at the Same Time

Dave began the panel by declaring that he thought the emergence of the Facebook platform was the most significant development in tech in the past half-decade. I'm not sure if I agree, but it's a defensible position--and there are only a handful of other contenders for that honor.

By letting anyone with a good idea and some programming chops add new functionality to its service, Facebook unleashed a truly big idea. Over the past few years, every significant Web site has become an application; if they all become platforms for third-party creativity over the next few years, we'll trace it all back to Facebook's big bang.

And yet...

Some of the panel discussion centered around a blog post by the Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher in which she mocked the current crop of Facebook apps as being stupid kid stuff. Kara's harder on 'em than I am--I can't slam Facebook apps such as iLike and Where I've Been too hard given how much time I've spent with them.

But it's completely true that I've never seen a Facebook app that's more than mildly diverting. I haven't seen any that don't pretty much do something you can do elsewhere, except within Facebook and with access to your Facebook friends. If there's a killer app of Facebook apps--the one that's the of what Visicalc was to the PC or Yahoo was to the Web--I haven't come across it yet.

How come? Well, for one thing, the Facebook platform is less than five months old--it deserves at least a little time to mature. (Visicalc appeared about four years into the PC revolution; the Web was around three years old when Yahoo launched.) And Facebook's roots as a place for college students to hang out probably encourage silly apps rather than life-changing ones. As the average age of Facebook users ticks upward, the range of apps may get richer.

So ultimately, I'm almost as excited by the Facebook platform as Dave is--even though I'm not particularly excited by any of the apps it's made possible. I suspect a "Visicalc of Facebook" killer app will show up at some point, and I'm looking forward to using it--even though I have no idea what it might be...

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