What’s in Your Apps Bar? Why?

I woke up this morning still thinking about what Kara Swisher wrote yesterday. She has a good point that a lot of the “big head,” applications are pretty infantile. And as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his keynote at Graphing Social Patterns yesterday, there isn’t really much of a useful long tail in the Facebook application world yet.

So I decided to go through my own application bar to see how the platform has served me. I found that I have four basic kinds of applications installed:

Apps that make my profile a content hub:

These applications help me manage the content in my life and coalesce it into one place. They’re particularly useful because they update my news feed when I do something new with my content, so my friends know about it.

Apps that help me explore my network:

These applications are fun because they create useful representations of the connectedness and betweenness of my network. I like seeing these kinds of representations of my friends. Expander is also cool because it helps me to draw my network ever closer to an accurate representation of the relationships between the people I have relationships with.

Apps that display additional information about me:

It’s widely accepted that self expression apps that don’t tap into people’s relationships don’t go far inside Facebook. But these applications are useful to me because they let me share more of myself on my profile. I don’t know how much my friends look at them, or if they even care, but I keep these apps around because they help me to paint a clearer picture of who I am.

Apps that help me interact with my friends in meaningful ways:

Some of these are silly and some of them are more serious, but the interactions that I’ve had with my friends using these applications feel meaningful to me, so I continue to use them.

After looking through my applications and contrasting them with some of the apps that other people are using, I’ve come to a conclusion about the state of the platform: it’s as varied as the people that use it. Nobody accuses the Web of being all about sex even though the vast majority of the content out there is porn. Nobody says that the Web is all about sharing physics papers, even though that was its first purpose.

Just like the Web, Facebook platform will be many things to many people. If Facebook can make it a truly open platform, it will become what we make of it. Yes, that will include infantile poo-flinging applications. But nobody will say that the platform is all about poo flinging any more than blogging is about people talking about their cats.

I’d like to get a meme started here. So I’m going to tag six people and ask them to share what’s going on in their applications bar and why.

I tag: Rodney Rumford, Mari Smith, Robert Scoble, Vanessa Fox, Nick O’Neill and Connie Bensen.

Welcome to our community! If you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed!