JCPenney recently launched an app on Facebook called Dorm Life. It’s targeted to college freshmen, and although this is a major portion of Facebook’s demographic and the app is well executed, it doesn’t seem to be doing well. It allows users to put pictures of JCPenney products on their profiles and suffers from what can be called the “free ad” mentality. Unfortunately, people will not flock to put something on their profiles just because YOU care about it. People will put something on their profile because it provides value to THEM.

Flirting is definitely something of value to the Facebook demographic, and an app for Calvin Klein call In2U would seem have tapped this perfectly in allowing users to anonymously flirt with each other. However, a basic premise alone is not enough; the details of the execution always matter and this app is clumsily made. Despite all the communication channels available through the Facebook API, there is an awkward requirement to know a friend’s external email in order to flirt with them and for them to notice a strange generic email received amongst all the other spam as something intriguing to act upon. Thus, any viral growth from friend to friend is severly hindered.

At least these apps tried to create something specifically tailored to the social networking environment. More often than not, the expedient course is to take the “round peg in square hole” approach and repackage pre-existing content from something completely unrelated into something vaguely resembling an application. This is what ABC did by taking widgets for its popular shows like Ugly Betty and allowing people to put them on their profiles. They are just pushed content and contain nothing in them that makes social media powerful. No personalization, no communication with friends, no user generated content, no interaction between people at all.

One can only imagine all the conference calls and PowerPoint presentations that went into creating these apps. It’s a shame that so much money and the time of so many otherwise talented and intelligent people could be spent on creating products so boring and useless. Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm in corporate America. Occasionally, however, a gem manages to make its way through the maze of cubicles and quarterly reports.

This is the case with an application called Parking Wars, which was created for an A&E show of the same name. Rather than taking the obvious route of aggregating clips and news from the show into something that no one would care about, they instead produced a thematically related game in which people park cars on each others’ profiles. It utilizes many of the hooks provided by Facebook to create an engaging social activity that allows people to have fun with their friends. Oh, and the show probably got a lot of promotion from it too.

This drowsy state of affairs in what has come to be called Data Portability has suddenly been woken up in a flurry of recent announcements. First MySpace announced an initiative called Data Availability along with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. It allows partners to use MySpace users’ logins, profile info, photo, videos, and friends list on their own sites. The next day Facebook announced an almost identical service called Facebook Connect. Then Google announced a service called Friend Connect which includes Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and other sites. It seems to be more of MyBlogLog-like widgets, while the MySpace and Facebook initiatives seem to be more robust APIs, but all are nothing but announcements at this point.

Taken together, they represent the next phase of social media APIs. The first phase was providing platforms for developers to integrate their applications within popular social networks. These new services turn this inside-out and allow other websites to incorporate user information from MySpace, Facebook, etc. There are only so many profiles the average person will maintain, so this has generally led to consolidation of a few large social networks. If people can easily use their logins, profiles, and friends lists across smaller niche sites, it will likely make it easier for these to grow.

While all the players in these announcements are part of an industry organization called The DataPortability Project, none of the platforms were actually developed within it. And while they use some open standards like oAuth, they will likely be incompatible and something of a platform war is inevitable. If social networks extend beyond individual sites, whoever maintains the crucial foundation of managing users’ social identities will reap huge rewards. The stakes are high and the first moves have been made. Let’s hope the result includes better, richer, and more varied social experiences for users.