The Children's Hour: Facebook Apps Are for Toddlers (There, We Said It)
Fine, call me a grumpy old lady, because I don't want to pass around a toasty complex carbohydrate globally. — Right now on Facebook, I have been trying to decide what to do near on two weeks or more, after receiving a …
Context & Ripple Effects
Four months after CNET catalogued the feeding frenzy of developers rushing onto Facebook's applications platform, BoomTown's Kara Swisher supplies the user-side verdict: the output skews toward what she calls toddler-grade novelties — her running example is being asked to pass a muffin to friends globally. The complaint lands at a delicate moment, because this spring Facebook graduated the class of 2007 out of college networks and into the open web, meaning the app catalog is now the first impression for adults who never knew the site as a student-only club.
The timing is sharpened by two moves from the same week: Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the fbFund grant program for application developers at TechCrunch40, and within a day the fund required every applicant to resubmit — an admission, however small, that the first pass of funded apps was not what Facebook wanted to put money behind.
First-order effects
- Facebook's own developer-funding vehicle, fbFund, is now the de facto quality filter for the platform: by forcing resubmission of all applications, it decides which of the thousands of apps spawned since June get capital, while columnists like Swisher argue publicly that the catalog reads as juvenile to the older users Facebook just acquired.
- Developers who built quick-hit novelty apps to ride the June land-grab face a narrowing path — grant money and featured placement will favor apps that can justify themselves to adult users, not another gift-passing widget.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's nascent ad products, like the self-serve Flyers program launched the same week, depend on brand advertisers buying space next to credible content; if the surrounding app ecosystem stays novelty-heavy, the inventory around those ads gets harder to sell at premium rates.
- Rival social networks watching the platform experiment get a live case study in the cost of openness: a flood of low-quality third-party apps can degrade the product experience faster than it adds engagement, shaping how aggressively competitors copy the model.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners evolve from neutral hosts into curators and funders — using grant programs and submission requirements to steer their app economies, because raw developer freedom produced volume but not the mature audience the business needs.
- The episode feeds the broader question of whether open social platforms can hold adult users at all once they scale past their founding demographic, or whether novelty-driven ecosystems accelerate the fatigue that eventually pushes users elsewhere.
The trend: Open social-platform app economies are entering a consolidation phase in which the platform itself, through funding and curation, decides whether third-party ecosystems mature or drown in novelty.