Facebook, one of the most popular social networking sites today, has major problems with the quality of applications being designed for their site. Most are pointless, many are buggy, few are good, and rare are the must haves. This problem might sort itself out with time, but right now it is a serious growing pain.

Finding sub-par quality applications on the Facebook site is a common theme these days. As frustrating and annoying as it is to navigate through the crap to find that hidden gem, you would think that the Facebook team would do something about it. That has yet to be seen.

A simple glance at the screen capture to the right will reveal some of the more crappy applications available on Facebook right now. Unfortunately, those are not even close to representing the worst that I have seen.

Adding to the frustration, many people install these applications, and I always question why. This only encourages those developers to put out more crap. If you are one of those people who have added the "Are you stupid?" application, then you truly are stupid; there is no avoiding that.

Innovation, skill, and common sense are some of the things that developers utilize to create great applications. I regrettably inform people that many application developers lack all of the aforementioned. It now even annoys me to look through the "newest" section in the application directory; it is just that bad.

I have repeatedly suggested to the Facebook development team some improvements that could be added to their system, but they seem pleased with the way things are going. However, I believe that their carelessness will just make things worse in the long term. It would be extremely disappointing to see one of Facebook's greatest features end up becoming its worst. I sometimes question if that is not already beginning to happen.

I love to use Facebook (I use it on a daily basis), and there is hardly any serious threat to Facebook right now, but there are many improvements that need to be made to the system. MySpace is suffering from a lack of innovation and improvements. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's owner, could easily take Facebook down that same path if he becomes complacent.

Technical analysis can simply be referred to as the study of charts. Like in the financial markets, things tend to trend over time--like growth patterns. MySpace has been trending upwards since 2005. Unsurprisingly, this is no longer the case.

Using several tools like Alexa, Google Trends, Compete, and common sense, I have seen that Facebook has been on a similar path that MySpace has taken in past years. One thing that is different is that Facebook has a much more significant growth pattern. It would not be a crazy idea to believe that Facebook will continue to trend upwards and experience more growth.

MySpace on the other hand, is in a slump. It has broken a nearly three year growth pattern! Facebook's popularity is having a dramatic impact on the growth of MySpace. I know that many of you reading this are likely to have, or have had a MySpace profile. Just a year ago I would have been the recipient of a "WTF" type moment if I told one of my friends that I did not have MySpace account; now I am questioning why I still do have the account open. Maybe some other people are feeling the same way.

If the technical analysis will be correct, and if there is no serious problem with Facebook's future regarding their legal issues, then Facebook could very easily take over the top spot in social networks by the second quarter of 2008. I am not going to flat-out say that this will happen, but it is a significant possibility--if I was betting on the situation, I'd be all-in on Facebook taking the lead. Regardless, it certainly should be no shock to anyone if this is the case.

A message to MySpace:

Dear Tom,

Are you ever going to take steps to actually improve MySpace? You could start by not having my friend's accounts being hijacked and as a result my receiving of spam messages on a daily basis. Also, you could try reducing the amount of obtrusive advertisements; they really annoy me, it is no wonder why people feel the need to use AdBlock Plus. It is such a shame to see one of the most popular social networks being wasted away by News Corp. What is the deal?

Your not top 8 friend,

James Mowery

Facebook is an amazing social network. Some say it is the best social network available. I agree with that statement; however, there is still work to be done. I took it upon myself to compile a list of things Facebook could add that would improve the service not only for myself, but for many others in the future.

In the depths of my brain I was able to come up with the following ideas to improve Facebook:

Application Tagging Support:

By my last count, there were well over 5,000 applications available for the Facebook platform (there were around 4,000 a month ago). That is an impressive amount of applications to try and sort through when searching for anything specific. I'm not going to question why, but instead insist that the Facebook development team gives application developers (or even users) the ability to add tags to describe applications.

For a crude example, if I want an application that is related to tennis, then I should be able to focus in on only those applications that have tags related to tennis and sports. Tags would make things much easier for locating application, and it would assist in the discovery of new applications. This would make both the developers and users happier. Facebook could even add those wonderful little tag-clouds to see what is popular at the current time.

Greater Privacy Control:

One of the greatest features of Facebook is the ability to specify privacy options for your profile. You can go from allowing everyone see everything, to only yourself having access to your information. It was, and still is one of the features that sets Facebook in a league of its own.

I do see limitation with the current setup. For instance, there are some groups of people who I don't mind seeing everything on my profile; there are some groups that I would like to keep from seeing only my contact information, but have access to everything else; and finally, there is a group who I would like to keep from seeing anything but the bare essentials on my profile, like work and business related information. That is three layers of privacy I would like to be able to work with. There are currently only two layers of privacy right now.

Those people who only have a few friends on Facebook might be able to deal with it (like myself for example), but those who have a greater amount of friends might need another layer of privacy. Facebook has advertised in the past about how they allow great privacy control, so I would like to see this added in the future. As an alternative to this, Facebook could possibly give us unlimited privacy layers and just let us create privacy groups instead, and assign friends to each group.

News Feed Options:

I am talking about the information you see when you first login to Facebook. There are a few issues I have with it. I dislike the "popular events in (whichever area/college) network" idea that they came up with. Yet some people might like it. So how about giving us the ability to specify if we want to see this or not?

I also do not appreciate that they display advertisements in the news feed. I would not mind if they changed the background where there is an advertisement to more clearly show that it is an ad, but to throw an it in the content with only the small text of Sponsored seems wrong to me. I know they have to pay the bills, but there are other ways to do this without being overly obtrusive.

Better Photo Quality:

I love taking photographs, and having a place to share them is important. Facebook is a great place to do the sharing part. Sure there are alternative services like Flickr and Photobucket, but why deal with that when you have all your friends on Facebook? So Facebook, let us show higher quality photos.

Right now, I believe the limit is 800 x 600 for photo size; this is sufficient, but I'd like to see higher resolution photographs. I wouldn't mind having an extra advertisement displayed above or below these photographs to cover the cost for hosting larger images. I think it would be a worthy addition. I'm sure most people who snap photos would agree as well.

Profile Statistics:

This should be familiar to the MySpace crowd. You have a counter that shows you how many people have visited your site, and you have the option to reset that counter at any time. I didn't find it particularly useful to me when using MySpace, but with Facebook, I believe it could be a useful tool.

If Facebook developers wanted to go for bonus points, they could add in a simple graph to show you your daily, monthly, and yearly viewing statistics; yes, I am a statistics freak. If they happened to match the quality of Socialistics, I would be very impressed. These are features that I would appreciate.

Last Words:

Most of these suggestions would be easy to implement. It does not take a rocket scientist to come up with these ideas. Privacy controls would certainly be the winner for me; however, any of the other improvements that I listed are great ways to further improve Facebook for the future.

Check out Tech In Demand's Top 8 Facebook Applications.

I am sure that most of you have heard of TiVo. Well, ReplayTV was threatening television advertising by allowing you to completely skip advertisements even before TiVo. What happened to them? The media and advertising companies sued them out of existence. TiVo has faired much better; however, there are still television networks that believe TiVo is the end of television itself.

How does the media and advertising industries combat this? They have product placement, advertisement overlays (like the lower-thirds), side-by-side (mainly for sports content), and much more. There simply has to be a way to generate revenue for all these television shows. The more technology that allows us to avoid commercials, the more obtrusive the advertisements will get. That is logical thinking and common sense; it is already happening, and things are destined to get complicated with time.

AdBlock Plus

On the web, there is a new war brewing. AdBlock Plus is a crucial part of this. This is an application created by Michael McDonald that was designed as a way to block large and obtrusive advertisements on the internet. Now it appears to simply block all advertisements on a majority of websites.

Considering that advertising is the only source of revenue for many, it is likely to spur on new methods of advertisement and change the ways they are delivered to us. The flip-side of things, it will harm many of the smaller sites, but the bigger sites will likely be able to afford new methods of advertising.

There is a possibility of technology improving to the point where you are forced to view an advertisement before even viewing a site, perhaps a ten second advertisement when you view main page. This would not be common on your typical blog or smaller sites, but as time goes on it is likely that this is the way we will progress for bigger sites.

The same product used to reduce advertisements will have an opposite effect in the long-term. It will bring more advertisements that will interfere with your interaction of content. Quite ironic to say the least.

Do You Care?

Many of you will not and will continue using AdBlock Plus without giving this a second thought. Some will give it some thought and continue using it. Maybe a very few will give it up completely.

It must be said, that I use the extension on a daily basis. I even gave AdBlock Plus high praise in my Firefox Is Great, But These Extensions Will Make It Extraordinary article. So I will continue to use it, even though I know of the long-term impacts it will likely have.

My Take

I have been keeping my opinions out of this article as I am not going to be the one writing and suggesting that using AdBlock Plus is right or wrong; in my past I've reverse engineered software, downloaded copyrighted music, and done many other things that would have pissed off the likes of Microsoft and Sony. All these things I no longer do. That beings said, I will give my opinions on internet advertising on the new web.

If you visit "web 2.0" services, or any site that you benefit from without paying, then advertising is likely a main component in the revenue stream. Without advertising, many of these sites have no backup plans for revenue. One theory of a "web 2.0" collapse is a failure in advertising.

AdBlock Plus could spur on development of other ad blocking applications and make the situation more critical. I've seen far too many sites that do not have a business plan, and many are destined to failure. If you take away advertising from these sites, it is just making things worse. Where does the blame go? It does not really matter, because everyone loses in the end.

Wrapping It Up

At the end of the day, all this doesn't hurt the big sites, but instead it hurts the little guys who will not be able to implement various ways to make revenue. I urge all of you who are big on the new wave of web services to click on advertisements to support developers. I enable sites to display advertisements and do click on advertisements for sites which interest me and provide a service I enjoy. I believe that at least 80% of internet users would not concern themselves with any of this, but to the rest, maybe you can help developers who are struggling to make a buck.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to Tech In Demand's RSS Feed to get this and more great content in the future.

Another Tuesday is here, which means it is another review of a "web 2.0" product for Web Tech Tuesday. This week it is ClutterMe. It might have a weird and somewhat unappealing name, but it might be an interesting concept that is worthy of checking out.

I woke up today and received an invitation to the ClutterMe site. It was unexpected, but I decided to sign up anyways. It took me only about 2 minutes to complete the process, and I was up and running.

I had no idea what this service was, and when I ended up on a bare screen with a few text boxes on it, I was slightly hesitant to explore further. I did go on though and started experimenting, and I was able to come up with an explanation of what ClutterMe is: ClutterMe is like a simplified wiki page that you, your friends, or anyone else that visits your page can edit (with privacy controls).

The concept is simple, but very interesting. Many newer services that are popping up seem to be going the route of Wikipedia, i.e. allowing others edit and add to your own content. Some don't fancy this idea, and some do; I am of the latter opinion. I believe that if you have people you actually trust as friends on a social network, that allowing them the ability to edit your own content can make for a great experience. I try to think of it as a friendly collaboration with the focus of socializing. This might very well be a quality of "web 3.0."

Granted, ClutterMe is not the first service to attempt something like this, and the social network by Yahoo, Mash, might have much more to offer if you were looking for something more complex.

You can add text, photos, videos, and more on your ClutterMe page. The company demonstrated some samples of the use of the service: to-do lists, bookmark link collections, blogs, and a pages to simply collaborate and share ideas were obvious. There are many more potential uses, including a photo gallery, project management, or even a simple webpage that you could share with your friends quickly. You can edit the text size, resize the content, move it anywhere, and links will automatically be clickable. It is very user friendly.

The product is only in beta, and I did have to refresh the page a few times to make things function correctly, but it is likely that these issues will be ironed out as time goes on. I would love to see the option to import content from other sites. I think ClutterMe could benefit if they attempted to incorporate widgets in their service, and maybe even let third-party developers get in on the action. Regardless, the service is quite impressive for the target audience.

The service didn't appear that appealing at first to me, but it exceeded my expectations; with improvements, ClutterMe could become something special in the future. You can check out my ClutterMe page here. Looking at it might be some fun, but interacting is even more exciting. I have six invites to give away. If you would like to try out ClutterMe, let me know in the comments section.

Search giant Google wants to purchase DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. The company has recently written to the European Commission requesting a review of the potential acquisition of DoubleClick. The European Union (EU) will be considering this request soon.

If Google does acquire DoubleClick, it will be another huge step in Google's dominance of the internet advertising industry. In the past few years, Google has rapidly gained strength with Google Adsense to the point where it is worthy of consideration by all website owners as a method for generating revenue for web-based content.

TechNewsWorld reports:
"We asked the European Commission to look at the proposed acquisition," said Julia Holtz, the search giant's lead antitrust counsel. "We believe this deal is positive for both users and advertisers, and fosters competition."
This news comes as Google awaits a decision from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about the fate of the Google-DoubleClick merger. Microsoft has been constantly in communication with the FTC about the implications of Google's potential acquisition. Microsoft feels that the deal needs to be heavily reviewed.
Microsoft, whose own interactive advertising buy -- the $6 billion purchase of aQuantive -- moved through antitrust review in short order over the summer, has hired a public relations firm to push for tough review of the deal by lawmakers and regulators, the The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Considering that Google has growing lead in the internet advertising industry, this deal might warrant heavy scrutiny. The threat to internet advertising is apparent as Google is very secretive about how Google Adsense really works. There has been heavy criticism in the past about Google Adsense, and this further increases the need to question this purchase. There are also concerns by many about privacy--just what information does Google collect, and to what extent does the company use it?

Microsoft has recently entered the realm of pay-per-click internet advertising to compete directly with Yahoo and Google. All three companies are determined to improve their internet advertising programs, and this will result in improved services for websites that utilize advertisements.

The internet advertising industry is still on it's baby feet. There are many areas for improvement and expansion. If a company like Google can shut out the competition, it could potentially decrease, or even halt the development of the industry. This is what is going to be on the minds of the FTC and EU while making their decision.

[Source: TechNewsWorld]

Update 1: 9-24-2007 @ 9:20 PM EST.

Google's official blog links to a new video that the Google team has posted about Google search results and privacy.  It can be viewed here.  Or view it below:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsUBnPRtTbI[/youtube]

Technorati, once thought of as the central-hub of the blogosphere, has been taking a stumble as of late. Things were great for Technorati in earlier years. Somewhere along the line though, Technorati lost the fire. Has Technorati's time come and gone?

What has gone wrong?

A better question would be, what hasn't gone wrong? Beyond the recent "Topics" section addition, the site has made only miniscule improvements for the longest time. The Digg cloning idea, Where's the Fire, just made me want to ask what was Technorati thinking? The lack of a solid community with features to connect others is non-prevalent. It just doesn't end.

Things progressively worsened when the CEO decided to step down and the company decided fired off 8 of their workers. These things are all signs of big internal problems.

It is also bad when your developers blog has consisted of mostly bad news, but Technorati's developer blog has been just outright demoralizing in past months. Most of the recent stories have been of staff leaving the company and power outages.

WTF?

"Where's The Fire" (WTF) has been nothing but a disaster. It does not appear to be a hit amongst the Technorati community, and it is rare to see stories with over ten votes at times. It appears to be more effective as a tool for spammers who decide to advertise porn and erectile disorder treatments. There are ways to fixing this, but it might be a little too late to do so.

Since I brought up spam: attempting to use the Technorati tags to filter content results in the never ending list of porn links. Jennifer Lopez is great, but what does her being naked have to do with technology? I don't need that, and Technorati should have been developing ways for the community or themselves to effectively police this activity.

Is there any good coming from Technorati?

Not exactly. I for one am not a fan of their authority system for ranking blogs. There are an immense amount of ways to manipulate the ranking of blogs. The site's core functionality is easily scammed and taken advantage of, and is not an accurate representation of anything useful. It could be modified or enhanced in many ways, but the team just does not seem to have their priorities straight.

A ranking system should have multiple methods of computing that rank, not just one method. A single method of ranking a site could be easily scammed and in the case of Technorati, it is scammed on a daily basis. I would like to see them incorporate a way for the community to get involved in the ranking process of sites. It would be an interesting attempt and something fresh from Technorati. The current method of ranking, is simply broken.

According to Technorati, my personal blog, which has received barely a fraction of the traffic that Tech In Demand is receiving, ranks higher than this site. That makes absolutely no sense at all, and it would be frighteningly easy for me to manipulate this system to make either Tech In Demand or my personal blog's rank much higher. I am not concerned with this though, and would not bother, because Technorati is no good for ranking blogs in the current state. Everyone should understand this and accept it.

Is this the end?

No one knows what the future is for Technorati, but I do know that change are needed. The company should take a page or two from MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog which are steadily growing in popularity. Both of those services promote interaction with a community based around blogging. Technorati is failing to accomplish anything lately, except for disappointments all around.

Technorati fails as a ranking tool based on content and/or readership. I sometimes question myself and wish to question others: why even use Technorati? It tries to do too much, and fails to do any one specific thing wondrous. This could change, but the team just does not seem to have anything going for them.

Ironically enough, while writing this article, the Technorati was not functioning for over 30 minutes. It was dead. Was this a foresight for things to come?

My site stats since the beginning of tracking Tech In demand with both Google Analytics and Clicky have revealed some pleasing statistics for Firefox. I will let the images speak for themselves:

These statistics are current from August 23rd, 2007 to September 12th, 2007. Firefox is currently leading the pack from which browsers visit my site--note that my page visits are not included in these statistics.

It is interesting to know that many more users are utilizing Firefox. Granted, my site is a technology related sites, and most readers are likely to be tech savvy, but it is nice to know that these users tend to favor Firefox more than the competition. Supporting open-source software, and supporting software that supports current web standards (unlike Internet Explorer) is a great thing in my opinion.

I am also a fan of the Opera web browser, and am glad to have them come in third place, but wish more people would use the browser compared to Internet Explorer. If you had the choice between Internet Explorer and Opera, I would strongly advise to go with Opera. It is more secure and offers many more options than Internet Explorer does.

There is good reason that Firefox is leading the pack. It is one of the safest browsers available today. System security is important to me. Plugins like Adblock Plus and NoScript also further increase the security of Firefox. So keep on surfing Firefox users, knowing that your numbers continue to grow, and with Firefox 3 right around the corner, there is only great things in store for you.

You might also want to check out how to Make Firefox Extraordinary With These Extensions.

Leave a comment and tell us what browser you use!

It is another Tuesday, and another review of an application. This time it will be Streamy. This application is making noise on the net and for good reason too; can it really be that amazing? I'll figure it out right here in my preview of Streamy for Web Tech Tuesday.

What Streamy Is

Streamy takes everything about web 2.0 and brings solid social features to a news reader. When I first saw Streamy, the comparison I made while in a chat room was "Google Reader + MySpace + Jaiku + Meebo combined together." I believe that is an accurate description of the application in my mind.

There have been some amazing applications that have accomplished parts of what Streamy is attempting, but never has one single application pulled all the various things and had it work so well together. If there is going to be an application that does this, Streamy appears to be it.

What Streamy Is Not

The developers of Streamy have recently released a blog post stating that they do not intend on killing Digg. That statement is true as many websites have oddly made the comparison of Streamy to Digg. As Streamy's blog entry states, the application has very little in common with the core functionality of Digg:

"Killing Digg is not our goal. Our goal is to bring you personally relevant news in an engaging, collaborative environment. That is not by any means mutually exclusive to a voting model."

Although, the Streamy developers did say:

"With that in mind, we do intend to kill the dry, boring RSS reader. I’m talking about the inbox-style RSS reader that is not intriguing, not social, and makes little or no attempt at personal relevance. We have created a system that aggregates syndicated content, channels it through your new and existing social networks, and creates a sum that is greater than its parts. Otherwise, as an aggregator, we do not replace tools - we mesh them into a new experience."

The Review

Streamy boasts a beautiful interface. It is quite possibly the most intuitive interface to come from a web 2.0 application; Streamy also makes great use of Ajax technology. Things like using your mouse and hotkeys for navigating content on the site is welcomed. You can drag and drop items to move them, and share them with friends easily. Beyond a few bugs that are to be expected in a beta product, the interface performs beautifully, and it will be interesting to see more themes for the Streamy. (I'm using the dark theme, but there is also the default blue theme.)

Streamy's main purpose is an RSS/News reader. There are many ways to add feeds. You can enter in an RSS feeds manually. You can also import an OPML file, browse by topic, and search through the top 100 tags to discover new feeds.

After adding your RSS feeds, you can then go to your "Subscriptions" page on Streamy (shown on the screenshot below) and then navigate through your feeds like a normal feed reader. You can use the 'f' and 'd' key to go to the next and previous item respectively. Navigating your various feeds is accomplished by using the Subscriptions box on the middle column. If you have ever used a feed reader before, then all this will come naturally.

Clicking on an article will bring up the article itself displayed right within Streamy. Here you can save, share, and navigate through the news. Hotkeys can be used to accomplish many of the tasks. You may also click on the title of the article to bring up a circular navigation menu (shown below) that will appear, and you can drag and drop the story on an icon to do various things like sharing a story, emailing a story, and more. There are multiple ways to accomplish the same action within Streamy, and most people will appreciate this.

You also have the ability to keep tabs on what your friends have been doing. Clicking on the "Down Stream" tab gives you information on what stories your friends have saved, commented on, and more. Filters are available to view only the relevant information you wish to see about your friends. It is also possible to link profiles from Jaiku, YouTube, Last.fm, and other services to your account.

The "Profile" and "Start" pages display information related to your account and content that is suggested to you. I question how Streamy decides which content is shown to you, but it seems to be doing an okay job as I have found several new feeds to subscribe to that I enjoy this way.

Getting into the more interactive features of Streamy, you can make comments on articles and view other members who have posted comments. You can also jump right into a chat room, which reminds me of Meebo in many ways, and there are usually people in the "Streamy Beta Testers" group chat where I have been spending most of my time.

Groups can be both created and joined. You can join a group related to car enthusiasts, and then share articles related to cars which fellow members would likely appreciate. Then you can hop in the group chat room and discuss why domestics are better than imports. There is also forum-like functionality built in as well for the group profiles.

All these features really bring Streamy together as a social community. If they added in video chat, I would be amazed beyond belief. Streamy really is focused on the social aspect of the experience, and it pulls it off. This is the kind of site you could immerse yourself in, and have open on your browser for hours at a time.

Considering that Streamy is still in beta, and has impressed me so much, I must say that this sure looks like a winner in the making. The hype surrounding Streamy is well deserved. Although the site claims to not be in competition with Digg, I really can see myself spending more time on Streamy than Digg now after experiencing both.

Streamy definitely has potential to be the greatest web 2.0 project created. It is still far too early to say that it is though. Many new web services popping up today do not have great business plans to generate money. It is going to be interesting to see how Streamy intends on making a profit from their creation. If they do accomplish that, then this will surely be a success story. You will certainly be hearing more about Streamy as time goes on.

So You Want To Beta Test Streamy?

I have two Streamy invites, but I am keeping the one for a friend. So if you are interested in trying out Streamy before anyone else, write a comment and explain why. If you seem interested enough, I'll send you my last invite.

I will attempt to see if I can obtain more Streamy invites to give away to Tech In Demand readers.

If you have enjoyed this review, please subscribe to Tech In Demand's RSS Feed.

I'm not going to be the one that says MySpace is in a losing battle, but I do believe that MySpace has taken a turn for the worst. Fortunately, I will give credit to MySpace for the inspiration of this article's title.

Facebook is revolutionizing social networking. The creation of the Facebook platform has propelled Facebook to the prime-time of social networking websites. The greatness that is Facebook has inspired me to create the Tech In Demand Top 8 Facebook Applications. I am sorry Tom, you could not make the cut.

#8 Where I've Been

Where I've Been isn't so much about interactivity, but more about displaying information with ease. It gives you a very nice map that allows you to specify where you have been, where you want to go, and where you have lived. All this is easily accomplished as your friend only needs to take a quick glance at your map to get all this information. It was one of the first applications I installed and have had it installed ever since.

#7 Socialistics

Socialistics is a new Facebook application that allows you to view statistics about you and your friends. Bar-charts and pie-charts quickly give you access to all this information. You can compare ages, locations, wall posts, and much more. You can also view information in tag clouds as well. There are many features to come soon, and a future review here at Tech In Demand is in store.

#6 Countdown Calendar

Countdown Calendar is great for those of you who wish to utilize Facebook as a productivity tool. This app allows you to create countdowns for any future events. You can customize the way they appear on your profile, and if you activate any countdowns on your profile, they will present you with a live countdown to the second. You can also share and find others who have created countdowns.

#5 Graffiti

Graffiti is a great application for those who are feeling artsy. It allows you to send and receive images that the users create within Grafitti. The tools available are not even closely related to Photoshop, but a person with a creative mind can make some very impressive works of art even with the simplistic tools available.

#4 Flog Blog

Flog Blog is a great application for bloggers everywhere. It allows you to update people who view your Facebook profile on the current writings that appear on your blog. There are many options available, and you can select which posts make it on your profile. The application also supports automated pinging, so if your blog supports this feature, then your Flog will be updated instantly.

#3 Flixster

Flixster is your one stop shop for all things movie related. With this Facebook app, you can easily review movies. It doesn't stop there though: marking movies you want to see in the future, comparing movie tastes with friends, viewing profiles for movies, and the ability to take movie quizzes to test your knowledge are just some of the things you can do with Flixster. Movie fanatics will love this.

#2 Compare People

Compare People performs a simple function: comparing two people at a time. It does this by asking you questions about one person against another, and only one of those people will win. You can also skip any of the questions. The great thing about this application is that in many cases, all the answers you receive are anonymous, or can be made that way, which leads to honest opinions about yourself. You are ranked amongst all your friends and can see where you stack up.

#1 Scrabulous

Scrabulous is by far the most addictive application on Facebook I have seen yet. It has even revitalized my interest in the old Scrabble board game. The application keeps track of your statistics for the games you have played, and you can play with up to three other people. Games can usually last from a few hours to a few days depending on the activity of all the players participating.

That wraps up my top 8 Facebook applications. I know there are many more great Facebook applications out there. So if you have one that you really enjoy that isn't on this list, why not post a comment and let everyone know about it! If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the RSS Feed.