Jennifer L | Blue Wave Studio

I first heard about Facebook Apps at the first NewTeeVee Pier Screening (two months ago). I had run into a tech reporter I knew from the San Jose Mercury News. She filled me in about the major Facebook announcement during the keynote from that night’s event dubbed f8, where CEO and Founder Mark Zuckerberg announced the Facebook Platform which gives developers access to their social network (or as Zuckerberg calls it, the “social graph”).

For the last two months I’ve seen the various Facebook Apps/widgets and seen my Facebook friends add these apps and use it and well…

I just don’t get it.

It just seems like clutter and most of the applications/add-ons themselves are not that useful (Facebook Causes might be the exception to this). Maybe it’s because I’ve never really tried it. So I finally added the video application today and while I understand the usefulness of adding video to share with Facebook friends, in terms of the other apps…

I still don’t get it.

What’s the appeal? Why are people using them?

I thought I was missing something until I read a post by Leah Culver co-founder and Lead Developer of the new Pownce (also co-founded by Kevin Rose of Digg) .

And while watching the live broadcast of the most recent Community Next conference on Viral Marketing, Jia Shen of Rock You (which produces 250,000 widgets a day) reiterated what he mentioned in the Virtual Items: Mainstream of Not? panel at the Virtual Goods Summit:

We think of social networks as the first day of high school. More than half a million people in the US join social networks every single day and when you go to it, you show up as a blank page. It’s like going to high school wearing the same shirt as the person next to you. You don’t want to do that, you want to make yourself look different, you want to stand out, you want people to be attracted to you.

During the Community Next panel, he then went on to elaborate that people like to accessorize and females moreso than males, but more specifically teenage girls. And given that his company is comprised of males in the Valley, they do research by talking to teenage girls and by subscribing to and actually reading fashion magazines like Seventeen and CosmoGIRL (apparently this season’s colors are pink and black… who knew?).

And then that’s when I had the epiphany.

I finally get it.

I am not a teenage girl.

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