My wife absolutely refuses to buy generic products. I asked her why and she claimed that “they’re just different.”

I went grocery shopping alone yesterday, and, with no one around to question my choices, I bought a generic store brand of apple juice instead of the usual Mott’s that we buy.

The ingredients are the same: water, apples, and ascorbic acid. So it would taste the same too, right?

At first sip I realized I was wrong. Whereas the Mott’s apple juice is refreshing, the generic apple juice tasted like it was squeezed from old, browned apples, and it had a dark, stenchy kick to it.

The difference is in the origin of the apples. The apples in the generic juice are imported from China.

So what’s the point of this blog post, and what do apples have to do with social applications?

You can hire programmers who can make you Facebook applications for very cheap. I’ll point you in the direction if you’re interested. I see customers inquiring on the forums all the time offering $100 for what is supposedly a “really simple app,” so I know the demand is present.

The resulting application from this cheap work will be like the generic apple juice described above. First, it will look plain and mediocre. Just another faceless social application out there that is saturating the marketplace and no one wants to use. If you want to see an application that is the antithesis of generic, check out our recent Facebook application called Crushmail. You will notice a big difference in the user interface.

Second, the application may look just “normal” on the outside, but it will be buggy and lack a lot of features that make up a good user experience. One of our company’s highlights is that we act as a creative agent for our clients.

When you present an application idea to us to promote your company, product, whatever, we don’t blindly go ahead and develop an application for you. Rather, we think of ways to integrate your idea with other features so that it is useful, attractive, and more likely to become a viral application. We had a recent client who wanted an application that was simply a registration form for the client’s website. But we refused to create a failure and, instead, improvised with the client’s idea and created a viral application that users would want to add. Meanwhile, the registration form for the client’s website is presented after reeling in the users with much more attractive features.

So don’t go with the cheap developers. Really, you get what you pay for and you will regret it. In the future, I will post a list of other social application developers who offer high quality development services like we do, so take your business to companies like ours and fuel the social economy with the good stuff.