O'Reilly's ETech (Emerging Technology) Conference features a smaller conference called Graphing Social Patterns (GSP) which dives deeply into the social networking phenomenon. GSP runs straight through to AppNite, a demo contest for developers. AppNite featured both educational and silly games, but a few gems emerged, both on the purely personal side and the business side.

We used to invent new ways to torture our school's disciplinarian (yes, that was somebody's job). After school we'd follow him home to learn where he lived; at night, we'd pay him . . . a visit. Looking back it's hard to understand why we did it, but then we had that time to waste. Today's school-aged generation is no different, so the relentless cavalcade of Facebook applications -- Hug Me, Circle of Trust, Entourage (what, you don't have one?), Friends for Sale -- is, frankly, a quest for that wasted time. Don't knock it.

For instance, take Just Three Words, a twist on the old story-telling game where a group of friends collaborates on a story by each writing a sentence or two and passing it to the next person to do the same (here, you use "just three words"). Seemed silly, but the company's users spend an average of seven minutes on the site, and plenty of people spend at least two hours a day. In fact, there have been Just Three Words parties. There are 60,000 stories and over 3 million entries. So don't knock it.

It also may be tempting to dismiss Puzzle Messages, where you type in a message and it sends it to a friend as an electronic puzzle (as in jigsaw) to be pieced together. Silly, right? This is a brand new application, but the company, TheBroth, has 12 million installs of its applications (Puzzle Messages is a micro app, a spin-off of its PuzzleBee Jigsaw Puzzles). Not too shabby.

Ever play Who Has The Biggest Brain? It seems easy at first -- a timed series of simple math questions you play against your friends. But it gets increasingly harder as you go. No time for games? How about 600,000 installs; a half million games played per day; a 20% engagement rate.

Ski season may be nearing an end in most places, but most of us can see the utility behind Ski and Snowboarding, a listing of 1,200 resorts tied to Google Maps, with community-based methods for properly geo-coding. As part of a community experience, you can mark the resorts you've been to, get weather reports, post photos and videos, recommend resorts, have friends confirm your level of expertise (as a basis for credibility), create trips, and so on.

Tim O'Reilly's keynote talk was an inspiring rap about the need for hackers -- the people looking in the hidden places for problems. He challenged the audience with some fantastic examples of both great and wacky inventiveness by those who he deemed "hackers," ending with him imploring: "Find a hard problem and try to solve it. That's what it means to be a hacker."

Aside from the blatant utility of some of the brand-new AppNite applications (I've chosen a few to blog specifically in later posts, complete with video), here's the other thing that is striking: nearly every company wrote these applications (many to the Facebook API) in mere weeks or days. Biggest Brain: four weeks; Just Three Words: three weeks; Puzzle Message just came out two days ago. The Facebook API only came out late last year! In other words, get ready for some more incredible time wasting.