I think that there’s real opportunity to build a social network platform that allows for useful applications. Right now, there’s an enormous outpouring of trivia. I’m excited by the potential, but like you, disappointed by most of the applications so far.

Do people actually *do* anything meaningful other than friending, adding applications, joining groups and updating status?

What about “___ beat __ in scrabblicious”, or even “Brad Fitzpatrick nailed his 95 theses on the opening of the social graph on Facebook’s door”?

I’d love to see the platform and the feed represent real activity, not just connection-forming.

Maybe the “next Facebook” (which might well be Facebook) will be the one that lets us really collaborate and not merely connect.

But first we need to figure out what we want to collaborate on.

I’m glad you weren’t at Kitty Hawk reporting on the Wright Brothers’ first flight. I can see the headline and story now:

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“Kara Kaptures Kid’s Kite Kontraption Krashing — How Juvenile”

[Kitty Hawk, NC] Today, an untethered kite-like device traveled a mere 120 feet in the air over our local sand dunes. This wouldn’t even be newsworthy expect that it required a gas engine, propeller and man aboard to even stay aloft (unlike any child’s kite which would have flown much higher and longer on this breezy December day). After the fourth flight, the “ground crew” was caught off guard by a powerful gust of wind which flipped the flimsy flyer over ripping it to shreds.

My question is when will these bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio who’ve invaded our windy climes finally get back to more useful pursuits? At least a bike can be used for transportation unlike their one-person powered glider that requires an assisted takeoff with two men holding the wings to steady it. This seems like an enormous waste of everyone’s time to me.

This reporter will be away for the next six weeks on my previously planned trip to England. You won’t have my stories to read because I will be boat-bound for two weeks getting there and two weeks getting back. I only wish I would have more than two weeks of my trip actually in Europe vs. dealing with the heaving seas of the Atlantic. Wish me luck — I get seasick and really wish there was a better way to get there.
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I wrote in a comment yesterday to your post
http://kara.allthingsd.com/200.....ne-update/ that I thought the Killer App for Business on facebook would be SuperGroups. I also see that one of Scoble’s commenters has an idea for a facebook app that would be a 1-Many shared conference app built on top of Skype and a shared Whiteboard. The innovation is just beginning and I’m quite confident that the inventors and entrepreneurs in the world will quickly make your “impatient grumpiness” go away.

BTW, if you ever want to have a live debate on this subject just let me know when and where.

Thanks,
Lee Lorenzen
CEO, Altura Ventures — the first facebook-only VC

(c) 2007 Altura Ventures LLC.

Though I’m inclined to say the drop (-9+% in pageviews and -3+% in uniques) is the leading-edge of a trend because it supports my view, we’ll have to wait to see what the international numbers look like. A close friend at Trinity believes the international numbers will be way up. We’ll see.

I talk a bit about it over at CommaVee (http://commavee.com).

So far I’ve only installed, and used, business or personal brand-focused applications.

One thing that did resonate with me at the Graphing Social conference was a quote from Jeff Nolan, “Regardless of the app, it’s extending the brand into a venue where it didn’t have a presence before. It’s not about advertising or functionality right now. The widget is an ad for the brand. It takes the brand into a new medium where people, a lot of people, can be exposed to it.”

For example, if you are a single web developer whose most complex application is a news database for a medium sized company website (5 authors/50,000 visits per month) then you will probably have no idea how to write an app that works when you have 100,000 users all reading and writing to the database on the same day. This is the point when concepts like DB optimising, indexing and caching start becoming essential – the Facebook environment is a hostile place, where a page load time above 8 seconds means failure.

A quick look as the Facebook Developer discussion boards shows a lot of people learning very quickly about these things, which can only be to everyone’s benefit in the long run. Perhaps, in a couple of years, we’ll look back at this period as the point when the bar was raised web applications in general, and ‘Zombie Bites’ was the unpleasant (but short-lived) price we had to pay to get there.