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Content Tagged Week
The Week in Review
When I asked my readers last week if they thought Lieberman’s support of John McCain would swing Jewish voters to McCain, 476 people responded. 65 percent said yes (311 votes total) and 35 percent said no (135 votes). One reader, using the screen name ssaglia, commented on the poll like this:This whole switch with Lieberman is so embarassing to the Democratic party. A one-time vice-presidential candidate now eight years later supporting the oppposing candidate. It just shows me how divided the Democratic Party is. Maybe the Clintons will be the next party loyalists to leave. Right behind her friend.”
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Pregnancy Week By Week
Read this to know what’s happening inside you during pregnancy week by week.
Bubble Calendar!
Yes, if you like to “pop” stuff, this bubble calendar might give you your very-badly-needed daily dosage.
The handmade calendars come in vertical or horizontal styles and cost $29.95 for paper backing, or $49.95 for clear acetate backing. They have the days of the week, with weekends in bold face, and all major US holidays marked down.
FB 2.1 Week of Year Feature
Google Calendar Show Week – Userscripts.org
Alex Popescu - Contributor of the week
Alex Popescu, tech Lead and co-founder of InfoQ.com and the same time co-founder of the Java testing framework TestNG, is the contributor of this week.
To see his impressive open source track record check his Bio - http://www.sourcekibitzer.org/Bio.ext?sp=l92
The Torvalds Transcript: Why I 'Absolutely Love' GPL Version 2 -- Linus Torvalds -- InformationWeek
Top 10 Facebook Apps: Extension
The final installment in our look at the top 50 Facebook apps will look at 10 apps for extension. These apps extend Facebook's core functionality to improve upon existing features (for the most part). This was the hardest list to create because there is probably more overlap in this category than any of the others, which meant excluding a lot of apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.
This post is the last in a 5-part series that has identified our picks for the top 50 Facebook apps (10 each in 5 categories). Be sure to check out Part 1: Work, Part 2: Play, Part 3: Media, and Part 4: Utility as well.
Extended Info
Extended Info is the perfect app to start off this list -- it even uses the word extended in the title! This app, which won the F8 Hackathon contest, allows you to tell the world more about yourself by adding custom profile fields such as activities, interests, favorite coffee shops, or whatever you can think of. With Extended Info your profile also supports videos, images, MP3 files, and colored text.
SuperPoke!
Who wants to poke someone when you can pinch them instead? SuperPoke! extends the built in poking application on Facebook by allowing you choose from an extensive list of additional actions. What sets SuperPoke! apart from other poking apps, is that you can choose to dole out new pokes, rather than just adding new forms of poking to your own profile. It would be great, though, if like the popular X Me app, you could define your own original poke styles.
Advanced Wall
The Advanced Wall app takes the Facebook wall to new levels by adding support for styled text, images, videos, and flash. This is all made possible through a nice wysiwyg editor. Some people might argue that this type of app causes the "MySpacification" of Facebook and should be shunned. But millions of people disagree, having already installed this app and others like it.
Top Friends
Top Friends is by far the most popular third-party application on Facebook, and with good reason: it's actually pretty useful. I have about 150 friends on Facebook, but I only regularly interact with a handful of those. Top Friends lets you create a box on your profile of your 32 favorite contacts for quick access. Rather than having to slog through your entire list of friends to find the buddy whose profile you're after, you can just click once after making him or her a Top Friend.
Live Blog
Live Blog replaces Facebook's notes app with a full blog that is displayed on your profile. It has support for YouTube vidoes and HTML, and includes commenting. Coming soon: RSS/Atom feeds, draft and preview functions, and built-in image upload.
Friend Stats
Friend Stats brings Facebook's network stats closer to home by showing you what your friends are into. It's a pretty interesting way to learn about your group of friends or coworkers and gives you a ton of statistics culled from their profiles including age, sex, political leaning, who writes the most notes, has the most wall posts, has held the most jobs, and a lot of other interesting facts. For example, among my friends, the most popular movie is "Boondock Saints" and the most popular TV show is "Family Guy."
Widgets
Like Advanced Wall, many people feel the Widgets app from Widgetbox contributes to the "MySpacification" of Facebook. And they may have a point. Widgets allows users to add any of the more than 10,000 Widgetbox widgets to their Facebook profile -- just like MySpace -- but thankfully, it doesn't let users get around the no autoplay rule Facebook imposes on Flash widgets. Many of the widgets available in this app let you add functionality from outside apps that have yet to make the jump to Facebook, and so this application will have a use for many people.
Graffiti
Graffiti is the most popular of the Facebook drawing apps. It's not the most advanced, but I think it is the easiest to get the hang of. And you can actually make some pretty impressive art with it if you A) have some modicum of talent and B) have the patience to do it (see below for an example). Graffiti places a simple drawing app on your profile that lets your friends leave you drawn obscenities (or works of art -- whatever they fancy).
van Gogh's "Starry Night" reproduced in Facebook.
Moodsic
There are a number of Facebook apps for displaying your mood (an extension of the built-in status app) and when I started I honestly didn't think I would pick this one. But Moodsic is one of the more novel of the mood apps. With Moodsic, you set you mood and the app matches how you feel with songs from popular artists. Moodsic got serious points for matching my mood of "somewhat sleepy" with "The Weight" by The Band -- a classic. Moodsic is also a monetized app -- you and your friends can purchase the music you're listening to. Some annoying bits: You can only play tracks once, and if you skip too many it disables skipping (similar to Pandora, in that respect).
I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead;
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, and "No!", was all he said.
--The Band
iGift
This was a tough one to choose. Both of the two top gifting applications on Facebook, which let you send Facebook-style gift icons for free, have the same number of gifts and more or less identical interfaces and features. In the end iGift won out for two reason: it has marginally better artwork than its chief rival, and it is categorized, making it easier to find the perfect gift for any occasion (or at least any occasion where sending a thumbnail image of a hot dog is appropriate).
Conclusion
Those are the top 10 Facebook applications that for extension. Which apps did we skip that you think should be in the top 10? Which apps shouldn't be on our list? Please let us know in the comments. Let the debate begin!
Top 10 Facebook Apps: Utility
Our list today will look at the top 10 apps for utility. These are apps that are in some way useful. This was a pretty broad list, and probably took us the longest to cut down to a top ten. As a result, we were unfortunately forced to leave off a lot of good apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.
This post is the fourth in a 5-part series that will identify the top 50 Facebook apps (10 each in 5 categories). Be sure to check out Part 1: Work, Part 2: Play, and Part 3: Media, as well.
Scrawl Pad
Scrawl Pad adds an editable text box to your profile that any of your friends can edit. While that makes it marginally less useful (since your friends can change anything it says, it's probably not suitable for important notes), it is still useful for sharing quick information with friends or coworkers about meetings or memos, etc. It blends very well into your profile and almost feels as if it should have been there all along.
Mobile
The official Mobile app from Facebook adds Facebook functionality to your mobile phone. View and upload photos directly from your camera phone, or send and receive messages, notes, pokes, and Wall posts using text messages. The mobile application also includes a phone book that lets you look up your friend's contact info.
HTML Box
HTML Box is an app that lets you add pretty much anything to your Facebook profile. You still can't get around the no autoplay rule that Facebook has imposed on developers, but with HTML Box you could add almost any photo, video, text, or flash animation/application you can think of. In a way, HTML Box lets anyone have their own custom Facebook app running on their profile (i.e., this is perfect for advertising your website or business via your profile!).
ChipIn
ChipIn is how you raise money on Facebook. Using the ChipIn application you can solicit funds from your friends for an event or collection and keep track of everyone's donation. No one actually gets charged until you reach your goal. [Austin from ChipIn tells me that this is no longer the case, and funds are now added immediately after "chipping in." -- Ed.] Trying to raise $100 for Bob's birthday party at the office? Install ChipIn, set $100 as your fundraising goal, and ask 20 co-workers to each chip in five bucks. The widget does the rest for you, collecting funds using PayPal and even keeping track of how far you are from your goal with a visual status indicator.
NewsCloud
NewsCloud is a social news application for Facebook. The NewsCloud app lets you submit, read, comment, and vote on stories from within your Facebook account. It also supports videos from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report. NewsCloud users can form and join "clouds" (groups) that focus on a specific topic of news, and can access Facebook's built in share utility to easily share stories with their friends.
my RSS
my RSS is a simple RSS reader for Facebook. However, it's not really the greatest way to consume RSS feeds, because if you subscribe to multiple full text feeds it just displays them all one after the other on a single page. I also couldn't quite get the feeds I subscribed to to display properly on my profile. Hopefully the developers of my RSS will continue to work on it and improve on the UI because a full fledged RSS reader inside Facebook is a very useful application. Even not quite fully cooked, this was the best RSS reader I could find on Facebook.
Files
Files, an application by online file storage company Box.net, allows Facebook users to share files from their profile. Each user gets 1GB of free space and their files are displayed in a box on their profile for anyone to download. The application is a snap to use, but I really wish there was a way to restrict files to certain friends or at least certain groups of people.
Carpool
There's really no denying that Carpool is a useful app, and one that will only get more useful as people join. Carpool does just what it sounds like it does: it helps people arrange rides together. If you need a ride home from school or what to arrange a carpool to and from work, this app can help you find like minded people in your area. The developers are also working on making carpooling safer by helping you find rides with friends, or friends of friends who at least aren't total strangers.
Price Tracker
Price Tracker is a useful little app for Amazon addicts like myself. The application keeps track of the price history for items on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.co.uk and notifies you when the price changes on an item you are tracking. The idea is that because the price of many items on Amazon changes rather frequently, by monitoring them with Price Tracker you can assure yourself you won't pay top dollar if you don't have to.
Cookbook
What's for dinner? Cookbook, a social recipe sharing app for Facebook, makes that a much easier question to answer. Browse, create, and share recipes, and see what your friends are cooking. Cookbook has 1588 recipes across eight categories as I write this, ensuring that you will never go hungry.
Conclusion
Those are the top 10 Facebook applications that for utility. Which apps did we skip that you think should be in the top 10? Which apps shouldn't be on our list? Please let us know in the comments. And be sure to check back in tomorrow for part 5 of our list. Let the debate begin!
Facebook Week Update
This week is Facebook Week on Read/WriteWeb. Here we'll re-cap the week so far and see what else is happening on other blogs.
Firstly the Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group already has over 400 members, after just a few days. It's open to anyone and you can join here. We're currently looking at what apps to implement to make the group compelling - if you have any suggestions, please comment here or on the group's 'wall'.
Top Facebook Apps
The highlight of Facebook Week has been Josh Catone's Top 10 posts. With nearly 1800 apps, the platform has been a runaway success for Facebook, and the most popular ten applications reach over 46 million users. Josh has picked his favorite 50 apps, across 5 categories. He's doing one Top 10 every day. Here are his posts so far:
Top 10 Facebook Apps: Work - can Facebook be used as an online office? You can but try, using these ten apps!
Top 10 Facebook Apps: Play - proving that he's a dedicated reviewer, Josh told me this morning on IM that he's been playing a game of facebook scrabble for 3 days now! What else can you play on Facebook? Check this post to find out :-)
Top 10 Facebook Apps: Media - today's list showcases apps that let users watch, display, look at, and remix video, audio, and photo content.
Facebook Analysis
Earlier this week I looked at how open Facebook is, really. Good comments to this post, including one from Omar Ismail who rightly asks: "is it possible to get data OUT of Facebook using REST APIs? If so, then I'd say that is quite open." Another commenter, William, answered that as follows:
"The Data and content that members own cannot be easily exported out, or used with many other existing internet applications. The flow of data and information is one way. The Open platform is in fact open for developers, but closed to the rest of the internet."
There's a lot of great Facebook analysis going on elsewhere too. Robert Scoble has a post entitled Why Microsoft doesn’t deserve Facebook. Dave McClure is possibly the most obsessed Facebook geek currently! He has loads of FB posts on his blog. Not forgetting the excellent Inside facebook, a blog devoted full-time to this topic.
Poll: How many Facebook friends do you have?
Don't forget to vote in our current poll:
