For the past few weeks I have been using Digsby, a smart Trillian-style multi-protocol IM client. I’ve tried such programs before — Trillian, Pidgin and Meebo — but for one reason or another they all annoyed me. For this reason, before Digsby I stuck to having MSN, Google Talk and Skype all open at once.

Digsby is quite cool because not only does it unite your IM accounts but it throws in your email and social networking accounts as well. So updates from Gmail, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace sit alongside your buddy list. Neat stuff. I believe support for more social networks is in the pipeline too.

Having said that, the Twitter features leave a lot to be desired. I have since started using Twhirl which I think is fantastic, save for the fact that it doesn’t open automatically when my computer starts up.

Beforehand I updated Twitter using Google Talk. But once I installed Twhirl I switched IM Twitter updates off because of course I was getting duplicate messages. But even then the problem of duplicate (or triplicate) messages did not go away. It got me thinking about the increasing trend for stuff people publish on one website to be automatically re-published elsewhere.

A lot of people I know use a Facebook application called TwitterSync. I am among them because I was screaming out for Facebook to allow this for a long time. The app automatically updates your Facebook status with your latest Twitter tweet.

This is cool because enlightened people know how great Twitter is, but there are so many more people on Facebook who do not use Twitter but could still benefit from the wise words you post on Twitter. The Facebook status is the ideal way to give your Twitter account a wider audience.

But what about those people who are friends with me on both Facebook and Twitter? They get the status updates twice. This was not so annoying beforehand. But because Digsby is hooked up to Facebook and Twitter, I get two little pop-ups telling me all about it — and this is in addition to Twhirl’s alerts.

This reminded me of a post written by Robin Hamman a couple of weeks ago. He asked, “is auto-feeding links to Twitter spammy?”

Then I came across a website called Tweet Clouds. This site produces a word cloud or heatmap of the words you use on Twitter. Three words tower above all the others: New. Blog. Post. Those three words appear at the start of each automatically generated tweet advising followers that I have just published something on my blog.

I do quite like it when people alert their followers on Twitter to the fact that they have just published a blog post. I think other people like it as well. I have just checked and over the past year Twitter has been this blog’s fifth highest referrer, bringing 888 visits. That is above Google Search and Google Search UK (although below Google Image Search and Google Image Search UK).

If you take out search engines and blog aggregators, Twitter is the second-biggest referrer to this blog (the biggest being Times Online’s blog platform, which is concentrated on just a few posts). Remember that this does not even include those who are visiting from the Twitter stream in their IM client or another application.

I often also click through when a new blog post is mentioned on Twitter if it sounds interesting enough. But I cannot stand it when other feeds are injected into a Twitter stream — people’s tumblelogs, Delicious links and the like. That is just overload.

If I was interested in someone’s Delicious links, guess what — I’d be subscribed to their Delicious feed. If I cared in the slightest about somebody’s tumblelog, I’d visit their tumblelog. Equally, however, you could say that if somebody really cared about my blog posts then there is already an adequate way to be alerted to new posts: RSS.

This problem is going to increase in the coming year as lifestreams and social aggregators such as Profilactic, FriendFeed and Socialthing! gain in popularity. In fact, these sites themselves demonstrate the problem itself rather nicely.

If you look at, for instance, my Profilactic ‘mashup’, you will see my blog posts appearing and soon afterwards the Twitter tweet announcing it. Then you will see my Delicious links repeated in a blog post (for vee8 at least). Jaiku had to be taken out because it is itself a pseudo-lifestream that already incorporates Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter and what-have-you.

Plus, Facebook has just begun to implement its own social aggregator-style features. If you already have the Delicious application installed then import your Delicious posts into your Facebook news feed, you will be getting the duplication in the Facebook news feed alone. (I tried it hoping that it would sync with Facebook’s ‘Posted Items’ feature — no such luck.)

This whole problem is summed up quite succinctly by Jon Bounds in a comment at Cybersoc:

The Facebook status, pulled from a twitter auto-announcing a blog post generated from del.icio.us links is not what I want form these services. And I get the feed of it at each stage.

It is probably time to step back, decide on which social aggregator I want to use, stick with it and stop republishing stuff on other websites. Still, I can’t help thinking that it just feels right to merge my Twitter account with my Facebook status, and it just feels right to publicise my blog posts on my Twitter account.

At the same time, it’s just not cool to read the same messages over and over again on several different websites. The internet is starting to feel like a giant echo chamber.

Ever since Facebook Applications exploded onto the scene, there has been a problem. Well, I say it’s a problem, but in reality it is actually an amazing thing. It is only perceived to be a problem by old fashioned companies that just Don’t Get It.

For several months now the old Scrabulous saga has been playing out. Some smart guys thought it would be a great idea to be able to play Scrabble with your friends on Facebook. They were right. It became Facebook’s most popular application, and could even count Mark Zuckerberg among its users.

Unfortunately, the creators of Scrabulous didn’t own the intellectual property to the game. The people who do own the IP, Hasbro and Mattel, have gone on the assault. They are suing Scrabulous’s creators Rajat Agarwall and Jayant Agarwall. This is despite the fact that the brothers have undoubtedly done more than anyone else in recent years to raise the profile of Scrabble.

Do you think if Hasbro and / or Mattel had created a Facebook Application for Scrabble it would have been as successful as Scrabulous? I, for one, highly doubt it. Their reaction alone has demonstrated that they simply don’t “get” the internet. Just like the recorded music industry before them, board game companies, it seems, have woken up to find that the internet has eaten away at their old fashioned business model. They don’t know how to capitalise on the internet. It needn’t necessarily be a threat. But their head-in-the-sand behaviour ensures that it will be.

My personal pet theory is that old companies got far too cosy in the 20th century ways. With the intellectual property rights wrapped up, they have seen no need to innovate. They have rested on their laurels. As such, their products have stagnated. Remember, the optimal length of copyright is around 15 years. A similar length will apply to intellectual property. Scrabble can trace its history back to four times that length.

As was pointed out on the Freakonomics blog earlier this year, Mattel’s and Hasbro’s plans for the future of Scrabble are pretty lame to say the least.

The plans include adding anniversary labels to Scrabble packaging and introducing a folding edition of the deluxe Scrabble board.

In the meantime, the best thing to happen to Scrabble in generations is being targeted by Hasbro and Mattel simply because they were not smart enough to come up with the idea in the first place. They should have applauded and endorsed Scrabulous. That way, they would have ended up with a hell of a lot more respect and almost certainly more sales than under the current strategy of the companies.

In the latest stage of their assault, Mattel have finally launched their own ‘official’ Scrabble Facebook Application. But The Guardian reports that all is not well. And yet again, the problem can be laid at the door of intellectual property rights.

Seemingly, the new ‘official’ application is only endorsed by Mattel — not Hasbro. This means that you can not play Scrabble in the USA or Canada, where Hasbro own the rights. For this reason alone, the trust of Facebook’s users has been lost. If you can’t even play against your friends just because they happen to live in North America, why would you bother defecting from Scrabulous which currently has approximately 700,000 “daily active users”?

Today another Facebook Application has been hit by a similar corporate strangling. This time it is from a company that you would think would be able to cope with new technologies better.

Tetris Tournament was an early Facebook hit, and one of my favourite Facebook apps. It didn’t take long for its name to change to BlockStar, but it was still clearly derived from Tetris. The game itself was a bit clunky, but it did the job and was good fun.

Today it has become “Tetris Friends (formerly Block Star)“. Yes, it is now an official Tetris app. So, is this simply BlockStar with a shiny Tetris logo over the top? Far from it. The new game is utter, utter shit. Amazing when you consider that it is actually the official Tetris game. The original is a classic. This is a big pile of flaming hairy balls.

For one thing, the game now only lasts a maximum of two minutes. That’s right. No new levels. No game over as you reach the top. Just a high score after two minutes. It is ready to finish just when you get into the groove. Meanwhile, the graphics are cluttered and confusing. This game is intensely unsatisfying.

The reviews agree. The application’s wall has become a stream of obscenities while the reviews section has turned into a mere succession of one-star ratings.

In this respect, the users of Scrabulous have got off very lightly indeed. The best Tetris app on Facebook has been mauled out of all recognition.

If you are a user of Windows Vista, you will no doubt be aware of Windows Gadgets. For the uninitiated, they are basically tiny little applications that run on your desktop (you might also know them as widgets or, in the world of Facebook, applications). You will also be aware that none of the sidebar gadgets in existence are actually useful.

Yeah, there’s that massive oversized analogue clock. And there’s that calendar that doesn’t do anything except tell you what the date is. Then there is the RSS reader that only allows you to subscribe to certain Microsoft feeds. The only really useful one that came as a default on Vista is the post-it note style thing. But apart from that, unless you really like currency converters, there was not much to get stuck into.

There isn’t even anything decent among the third-party efforts. The only good one is iTunes Accessory. Almost all of the others are banal and pointless.

This always struck me as a bit weird. After all, there seem to be a lot of good widgets available for Mac OS X. And even when you look at the wonderful and varied ways that Facebook Applications have been used, the world of Windows Sidebar Gadgets is startlingly stagnant.

But yesterday I discovered a truly useful and surprisingly well-executed Gadget made by National Rail Enquiries. Once you install the gadget, you simply type in your start station (and, optionally, your destination station) and up pops a list of how the trains are running. Essentially, it is the live departure boards feature of the National Rail website, just sitting there in the corner ready for me to glance at.

I already put it to good use yesterday, in my little game of chicken (what’s the latest train I dare to get?). I couldn’t decide which between two trains I should get. But when the earlier one started to run late, I decided I had better stay on the safe side and get the earlier one.

The gadget could do with a couple of extra features. Clicking on a journey brings up a larger screen with details on the expected journey times — but only from your station onwards (eg., I get a table of all the stations between Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh Waverley). But I usually like to see how the train has been running at stations prior to Kirkcaldy to give me a better idea of the journey’s history. I always get the impression that the journey estimates are a little on the optimistic side, and I’d rather like to see the cold, hard facts of how the train has actually been getting along.

But I can’t complain too much. As I said, it is just amazing enough that such a useful gadget has finally been made, and by National Rail Enquiries of all people! I get the feeling that it is going unnoticed (apparently it’s been around since July, and I’ve only just found out about it). If you are a regular train user and have Windows Vista, you probably ought to install it.

A couple of days ago I wrote about how Facebook applications are beginning to reveal their potential. It feels like a good time for me to review some of my favourite Facebook apps (in addition to Scrabulous and Neighborhoods which I already wrote about in the other post). I will start with the apps related to one of my favourite websites.

Last.fm

Last.fm got off to a bad start on Facebook Platform when it was shunned by the Facebook bigwigs in favour of iLike and Mog. As such, it was an agonising week or so before an official Last.fm app was unveiled. In the meantime, a plethora of unofficial apps were hurriedly made.

To illustrate how damaging the delay was to Last.fm, iLike (which was practically unknown prior to its presence on Facebook) now has 6.4 million users on Facebook. Meanwhile, both official Last.fm apps combined have just 138,000. Yowch!

iLike seems to appeal to a lot of Facebook users, but I just don’t get it. All it amounts to is a bunch of crappy thirty second long audio clips. Meanwhile, the Last.fm apps bring together everything that I love about Last.fm itself.

Last.fm Music displays my top twelve artists of the past week. Alongside sits the playlist that I described on this blog a few weeks ago. In a sense, I have made a mixtape ready for all of my Facebook friends to listen to! This is awesome! None of that thirty second clip nonsense.

You don’t even have to be a member of Last.fm to use the app and make your own playlist, so there are no excuses. This ought to be spread far and wide.

The other official Last.fm app is a simple box that displays what you are currently listening to. Cunningly, they have called it What I’m Listening To. Intriguingly, this app seems to hush up the connection with Last.fm, even though this time around you do need to be a Last.fm member to use it!

Formula 1 Picks

This is another way to showcase my failure at everything (as if Scrabulous wasn’t bad enough).

Formula 1 Picks allows you to select your favourite Formula 1 drivers. Slick logos appear for each driver that you choose. The colours relate to the driver’s team, although I would prefer the driver’s helmet to be displayed as well.

However, if you are like me (and many other F1 fans — tifosi spring to mind) you tend to support teams rather than drivers. This application does not yet allow you to select which teams you support, although this is promised. In addition, it is promised that you will be able to select your favourite circuits as well as drivers and teams from the past.

This has one advantage over an application such as Sports Fan which allows you to select from a rather messy ragbag of teams and drivers (I counted at least five different variations of ‘Ferrari’, and that was just on the first page!). There are no duplicates and the logos are standardised and slick. However, it is frustrating not to be able to select my favourite teams yet!

Here is where my failure comes in: Formula 1 Picks is also a game. Prior to each grand prix you select three drivers. These picks translate into points. You score 100% of the championship points that your number 1 pick collected at the grand prix, 75% of the points of the number 2 pick and 50% if the points of your number 3 pick.

I have been playing for two grands prix, so my highest possible score was 38. My actual score is 27.5. Matters were not helped by petulant Lewis mucking up my number 1 pick’s chances in Hungary!

Friend Wheel

This is a neat visualisation of all of your Facebook friends. It is quite flexible, with various different display options for you to choose from. It is interesting to look at the tapestry to see the various connections between your friends. One disadvantage is that it does not update automatically, so you need to keep on manually updating it to ensure that it stays up to date.

Friend Wheel has proved massively popular. But the ‘friend visualisation’ is nothing new, and another application provides a more traditional way of viewing the connections between your friends.

TouchGraph Photos

Remember those Java applets that visualised your LiveJournal friends? This is a more polished version of that for Facebook. It’s quite neat, but beware. Its focus is on photographs. This means that the first thing you see when you launch the visualisation is those embarrassing drunken photos. Oh dear!

The Political Compass

We all know The Political Compass. It is the granddaddy of online political tests, much imitated but seldom bettered. I have posted about my position on the compass on this blog roughly once a year to track my progress.

This Facebook application allows you to display your position on your profile and compare it to your friends’ positions. Four of my friends have taken it so far. Slightly disconcertingly, I am the most economically right wing of them all, with a dangerously laissez faire score of 0.38. That’s centrist really (the extreme score is 10), but I was amazed that I am even slightly to the right of Angry Steve. Recount!

There are a number of other political tests available as applications on Facebook. Among the most popular is The Washington Post’s lame “are you a libb-rul or conservative?” test that claims to be a compass, then proceeds to chop that compass in half!

Another popular one is The World’s Smallest Political Quiz. It is, as its name suggests, brief. But this means that it lacks the nuance of The Political Compass. It is also made by a libertarian campaign group, Advocates for Self-Government, which surely compromises its neutrality. (Interestingly, in contrast to The Political Compass, I come out as “left liberal” in this quiz!)

Irrepressible.info

Staying on politics and issues, here is something that might be familiar to a lot of bloggers. Many sidebars — including mine — carry a little box containing snippets of content from various publications that have been banned by governments around the world.

It is a project led by Amnesty International with the aim of undermining censorship by publishing banned content in as many places as possible. This Facebook application simply puts some of this content on your Facebook profile. If you have the box on your blog, why not put it on your Facebook profile?

Anything else?

I didn’t think I would end up using so many Facebook Applications, especially since its closest relatives (such as Bebo widgets) are so dire. But I’ve been surprised at how many great uses have emerged — from the trivial time-wasters to the worthy and useful. So, are there any other suggestions? What excellent applications do you have on your Facebook profile?

Sorry about my absence over the weekend. I was here all along. In fact, I was here more than usual. It was one of the least busy weekends I’ve had in a while. But I somehow misplaced my blogging mojo and I was distracted by other things.

Other things like my latest internet addiction, Scrabulous! Jeremy Bentham thought that humans wanted to maximise pleasure rather than pain. Goodness knows what he would have thought if he saw me inviting Facebook friends to play Scrabble against me.

It has mostly been a demoralising affair. I hadn’t realised quite how rusty I was at Scrabble. I knew it was bad when I changed my target in my games to staying within 100 points of my opponent. Apologies to everyone who has had to put up with my awful Scrabble standards.

Still, I did win one game. I got off to a good start with ‘zealot’ early on, but I fell behind. Just when it was looking beyond hope, I redeemed myself with — of all words — ‘pies’. I always knew they were good for you really.

It’s incredible to think about the popularity of the Scrabulous Facebook application. I would never have heard of Scrabulous if it wasn’t for Facebook even though Scrabulous must have been in existence for a while.

This is part of the genius of Facebook Applications. They realised that there is added utility in combining other websites with Facebook. For instance, with the Last.fm Facebook apps I can see the music that all of my friends are listening to — people who I didn’t necessarily know had a Last.fm profile. With Scrabulous I can instantly play games of Scrabble with my friends without having to sign up or track down my friends.

All this has got me thinking about Facebook Applications again. When they were launched at the beginning of the summer, it felt as though there could be two or three really good uses for it, but that it could lead to the kind of overload that makes MySpace unbearable.

Now my profile has 14 apps on it (not including the ones made by Facebook themselves) and rising. Some are trivial. Others are distracting. The best are nigh-on revolutionary.

Perhaps with the latter group of applications in mind, Facebook themselves appear to have taken a bit of a step back. One annoying move they have recently made has been to call their excellent Courses feature an application and promptly remove it. I still don’t understand the justification for it.

For students like myself (who, after all, Facebook was originally designed for), the courses feature was not a mere add-on service. It was practically integral to the website as it allowed you to easily find your classmates.

Now it has been ripped out and replaced with at least two different applications (and probably more in the future). And because different people will be using different applications (or none at all), now you won’t be able to find your classmates so easily. Not the smartest move by Facebook if you ask me.

I wonder quite why Facebook felt the need to pull out. Maybe they are feeling the heat of the spotlight a bit too much. It’s not good to be the top dog. Ask McDonald’s, CocaCola, Microsoft or (now) Google. These companies all receive exponentially more flack than whoever is on the next rung down. Facebook is dangerously close to being among them.

By passing on responsibility for so much of its functionality to third parties, at least Facebook can now attempt to divert the attention elsewhere. If somebody launches into some kind of tirade about privacy and the courses feature, Facebook can now say, “Don’t look at us — it was [third party application developer].”

Perhaps there are less sinister reasons for Facebook’s change in tack though. A new application is causing a bit of a buzz and it is putting Facebook itself to shame (via Martin Stabe).

I have written in the past about how Facebook’s geographical networks are woefully inadequate. Basically, they have plucked some major cities from the atlas and decided that that will do. There are only 17 geographical networks for the UK, and they are almost all major cities.

If you are in Scotland you have to choose from Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh or Glasgow. Tough luck if you live in the Western Isles or even Fife, a peninsula wedged in between two of the aforementioned cities.

The rather excellent looking Neighborhoods app cuts out all of this nonsense. It makes these geographical networks for you. I added the app and it created a Kirkcaldy network for me, just like that! It has its own network-style page.

Of course, the problem with this is that the network is extremely small compared to, for instance, the Edinburgh one. In fact, I am the only member. But perhaps the tight-knit nature of these networks will work to its advantage. If the Neighborhoods app takes off (as it apparently has in Seattle), it could prove to be just the ticket. A simple solution to an old problem that Facebook themselves didn’t have a solution for.

It feels like a good time for me to review some of my favourite Facebook apps. But that will come tomorrow.