Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful. “How will this software get my users laid” should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

“Social software” is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

With the young kids the hook we’ve got into them is the iTunes store and the iPod. Pretty obvious strategy really. With kids the hook is always music. That’s why the whole iPod thing was such a brilliant maneuver. Because it brought us across the generational divide. The iPods get the kids into the store. Once inside they can look at those beautiful sleek expensive iMacs and lust after them.

Remember, geezers, when you were in high school and college and the biggest purchases in your life involved vinyl LPs and stereo gear? Remember when you would spend hours in record shops? Remember how much you cared about some new album? Remember standing in the hi-fi shop, lusting after the Linn LP12 turntable or the Quad speakers and telling yourself if you ever got some money you were going to buy a set-up like that? Same today for these kids. Our stuff is what they aspire to own.

So we bring them in with free rock concerts and we prime the pump with 10 free iTunes downloads to get them using our system. They start out with an Apple iPod and then they save their pennies and buy a Apple Mac mini or an Apple iMac. Or an iPhone. We’re their record store, and their hi-fi store, and their TV store, and their phone store.

The biggest things in a teenager’s life — other than cars and dope — they can get from us. Not a bad business to be in. Yeah, we don’t get the enterprise market. We don’t get to sell to IT departments who beat us up on price and squeeze our margins to zip and choose their servers based on which company (HP, Sun, IBM, Dell) is giving away the most freebies this week to win business. Boo hoo. We’ll deal with it.