Facebook apps confuse me and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

Smartphone apps don’t confuse me. I locate an app in the app store. I buy or download it for free. It shows up on my phone and I can use it, play with it, listen to it, whatever without any connection to any website or social media network. It’s a mini computer program. I get it.

Facebook apps, on the other hand, come with strings. There are games that you must play inside the walls of Facebook. There are games that (apparently) you can play outside and just report your activity on Facebook. There are apps that lead you to a website that you could have landed on faster by typing the URL and there are apps that seem to do nothing more than leave a trail on your wall.

To take some of the mystery out of Facebook apps, the social network has finally released their new App Center.

Here’s something we like to do at Marketing Pilgrim. Discover two interesting stories and tie them together for you.

Take, for example, news that Facebook’s growth in the US is starting to stall…

…Facebook’s user growth rate in the U.S. is slowing sharply. In April, U.S. unique visitors to the website increased to 158 million, up just 5% from a year earlier, according to research firm comScore Inc.

Consider that in 2011 growth was running at 24% and in 2010 a staggering 89%.

As the WSJ points out, the slowdown is likely due to the fact that Facebook is already used by a whopping 71% of all 221 million internet users in the US. So, it’s to be expected that its growth rate would slow down.

Hip and cool Twitter has partnered with a major sports organization to promote their hashtag pages. Considering the NBA Finals are getting underway and Major League Baseball is in full swing those would be the logical choice.

Well instead Twitter, the Internet darling, is pairing with NASCAR and they are running their first ever TV ads to promote the union of Internet savvy and, well, rednecks. Here are two samples of the ads.