Why Halloween-Themed Applications On Facebook Stink

Social media still can’t take the place of good old-fashioned trick-or-treating and costume parties.

That oversimplification may partly explain why Halloween-themed applications on Facebook are such an underdeveloped category; the relative dearth seems like a disconnect when compared to the high visibility of the holiday in the changed news feed.

A handful of applications on Facebook invoke Halloween, mostly replicating a subset of the options within greeting card apps.

Only one app differs from the trite seasonal greetings meme: Halloween Pumpkins, which has 130,000 monthly active users, has an average rating of 3.8 stars, based on 13 reviews. The game seems a bit like a pumpkin version of Tetris.

Halloween has increasingly become as much of a holiday for adults as children, so the minimum age requirement of 13 on Facebook doesn’t wash as an explanation for why apps for this holiday underwhelm compared to other occasions.

Now that might change if developers figured out a way to create applications that improve upon Halloween photo uploads to Facebook.

But people are content to share Halloween pictures using Facebook’s existing photo albums, tagging and wall posts, without requiring any holiday-specific applications to envelop this practice.

Readers, do you have any other ideas about why there aren’t more Halloween-specific apps on Facebook, and why the existing ones don’t have more traction?

Posted by Jackie Cohen on October 31st, 2011 2:44 PM

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