The Children’s Hour, Part 2: Can Facebook Apps Grow Up?
Yes, I meant it when I said that too much of the Facebook environment these days was like being present at a loud Wiggles concert in the kid mosh pit–and I have been there, so believe me. Except, in the case of the hot social network, the Wiggles never ever stop wiggling. Or SuperPoking. Or Cartoonifying. Or inundating me with digital picture gifts of “giraffe love” (I could not make this up, you realize, as you can see here). Yesterday, I did a long post on the fact that most Facebook apps, also called widgets, are startlingly juvenile and mostly banal. My gripe was the lack of truly useful apps from either Facebook or the legions of third-party developers that it allowed onto its fast-growing platform to offer all sorts of services in the form of apps. As I said yesterday, millions upon millions of people are downloading and using these apps, riding on the back of Facebook’s own hypergrowth to 45 million active monthly users. Active maybe, but doing what, I wondered? A whole lot of n
