Children Grow Up: Why Kara Swisher is Dead Wrong about the Facebook Platform

Kara Swisher wrote today that:

What Zuckerberg and the widget-makers have wrought is mostly silly, useless and time-wasting and the kazillion users of these widgets are pretty much just acting like little children.

Swisher has a point. Most of the applications that are currently popular on Facebook are infantile. Personally, I’m not a big fan of biting my friends, flinging poo at them, or tossing around a hot potato. It distracts me from the applications that really do matter, like (fluff)Friends…

In all seriousness, Swisher is missing a critical point. The infantile nature of the currently popular applications doesn’t mean that the Facebook platform is doomed to be a complete waste of time forever. In fact, it means the exact opposite, and Swisher has unwittingly hit the nail on the head when she compares the developers and users of these applications to children.

There is a great deal of evidence — both scientific and anecdotal — to suggest that children’s play is not just unstructured, wasted time. It helps them process their anxieties and make sense of their experiences in a complicated world. And this isn’t just true of kids. Anyone who has ever brainstormed with a great team knows that things get a little silly when people are being creative in a comfortable setting. This is how great ideas are born.

This phenomenon is especially true with geeks. We work hard, drink too much Red Bull and eventually get a little punchy and start quoting Futurama. I see this all the time when I’m working long hours developing WordPress sites with my colleague Jason. We’ll leave silly little notes to one another — often referencing obscure phrases relating to LOLCats — all over the front-end site copy and sometimes all over the code. Of course, we clean it up before handing the site over to clients, but the silliness helps us process our ideas, relieve stress and work well together.

This is no less true of Facebook developers. The Facebook platform is less than five months old. Developers have had fewer than five months to get silly with their ideas. And as they play, they’re learning the structure of the API. They’re brainstorming clever workarounds and coming up with great new monetization strategies. In short, they’re innovating.

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