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In response to Tim O’Reilly’s clarion call for developers to make better use of their time, developers fought back loudly today at a rare weekend conference, made more poignant by some headlines about how popular iPhone applications are getting.

Jia Shen, of the wildly popular “Rock You” application for Facebook, took the podium first, and described the state of the “application” industry, and addressed Tim O’Reilly directly.

“Tim, if only you knew what we’ve tried in the past. Its not that we”, an Jian Shen gestured to all of the developers gathered on stage, including other prominent Facebook developers such as R. Tyler Balance, of “Slide”, and Blake Commagere of “Vampires”, “don’t want to create applications of worth and depth.”

“No, its just that the American — and dare I say — world wide public who uses social applications simply don’t want to.”

Shen then went onto describe some of the initial applications, where he had worked closely with some of the labs at Brigham Young University to develop applications that would allow people to participate in the cure for pancreatic cancer. Or, Balance’s effort to tie in an application that spread the word of the HIV epidemic in Africa. Or, Commagere’s initial “build it” works, that collaboratively would have helped some critical development of energy efficient solar panel use in England.

“Tim didn’t get it. There was simply no interest … none at all.”

At this point, Balance burst into tears, and took the podium briefly, shouting hysterically “don’t you people get it? We don’t want to create meaningless drivel! We’ve already created applications that will help everyone! All of humanity kind-of-stuff! People don’t want to play it or engage with it — even if we tie into the meaningless drivel. In fact, it makes people want to play with it even less.”

Several iPhone developers took the stage at this point, led by Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous and the wildly popular “Tap Tap Revenge”, and somberly agreed.

“Its not that we didn’t do exhaustive testing. We all did. Its not that we haven’t tried developing applications for the iPhone that are significant and meaningful. Focus groups just hated it. People hated it. My mother — God bless her — hated it. Let me be clear, they weren’t apathetic towards it. People had a strong dislike of these kinds of applications to the point of emailing us, calling us, and sending us packages paper bags full of flaming dog waste.”

The conference went to questions and answers after that, and we caught up with Jeff Jarvis, of BuzzMachine for his thoughts.

“Well, this is to be expected. Platforms like Facebook or even the iPhone, while revolutionary in their ability to be a distribution platform, are also platforms that people use, for a lack of a better phrase, to kill time. No one wants to be pestered about saving the world, curing cancer, investigating the deepest secrets in the known universe, or participating in ground breaking research. They simply want to waste a few minutes in a cyber proxy environment, and whether that’s imitating zombies or vampires infecting other people, creating meaningless slideshows to soul-less pop music, or playing musical “rock and roll” games.”

“Tim O’Reilly should get a pat on the back for wanting things to be better. God knows they should be in this industry which appears superficial and vacuous. But quite frankly, this is also a market economy. Sometimes people are only getting want they deserve.”

© 2008 TekPopuli.