Social Network Miniature Applications · Jan 31, 06:54 AM
There’s huge excitement about applets or miniature applications which are appearing on various social networks. In this article I am going to explain about social networks and platforms and take a look at whether there should be so much excitement.
It’s necessary to quickly introduce the concepts in this article first.
Social Platform
Social networks are websites that focus on building a community and providing tools and functionality that helps people connect with one another.
Primitive social networks have been around for years as side-effects of popular websites built around specialised but popular topics. By the late nineties or so they were really starting to develop as websites in their own right. MySpace is a good example of a social network created purely to be a social network.
A social platform is the next step again. Facebook is a good example of a social platform.
Taking the network they have created and adding deep tools to help people organise, developers almost immediately realise that in order to produce a really deeply connected and content network, you need to allow people to organise themselves.
This is where the concept of building “apps” comes from. Apps are tools that can be added or removed in order to provide the sort of functionality that users themselves want. The next logical step was to let 3rd party developers take a crack at developing apps and in one step you’ve gone from network to platform.
MySpace and many other networks have integrated or are now starting to integrate this concept and are thus upgrading themselves into social platforms.
Social Applets
Since “apps” are an innovation of social networks, it’s not surprising they are nearly all based on the friends concept. An applet is a small, specialised application that runs within a wider system but usually cannot run standalone. The term “social applets” sums-up the scope of these applications-in-miniature perfectly.
Purpose
To understand the purpose of social applets, we need to take a look at why they came into existence.
Users often try to extend the abilities of websites they are using (customise) and usually do this by crude methods which can introduce security problems and can also violate the terms of use of the site or other sites. By giving users an easier alternative in the form of simple, authorised extensions you can satisfy user demand and retain an element of control over your site.
Social applets are very valuable to outside companies too. If the social network has opened up it’s new platform to 3rd party developers, you can get an applet developed for the company which will promote your company or your services/product.
Are they really useful?
The world’s smallest political quiz
Presents a political grid and plots my position on that grid. A nice applet that allows me to graphically show people my position on the authoritarian/libertarian and left/right axes.
Useful to anyone interested in politics.
In the vast majority of examples, the answer to that question is a pretty definite “No”.
Most applets do one thing and one thing alone. Much of the time this is something which is not needed so these applications become very disposable. For example, I have only one applet installed on my Facebook profile. Like most others this only does one thing, but it does it well.
Gimmicky applets are not useful but they do give bored people something to do. Such gimmicky applets include “Zombies” and “Vampires” plus a horde (no pun intended :-) ) of other applets along the same lines that appear to be themed clones.
A more useful class of applets will eventually make their debut. I anticipate more mash-ups with existing useful web services (Flickr and YouTube already have applets on Facebook, for example). Building useful web services from scratch using applets is unlikely.
Applets are also useful for promotion – you could easily promote virtually anything.
Is all this really worth the excitement?
Not really. Anything you can do through social applets you could do already. Apart from a few minutes of geeky or gimmicky fun, social applets currently offer virtually nothing.
I will be excited when applets are developed that allow you to help other people or network meaningfully.