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 I’ve not been posting for the past couple of days. I’ve been keeping myself busy at some other place. More on that later. I will get round to everything I said I would though!

In the meantime, I have some thoughts on Facebook, which seems to have become a phenomenon over the past couple of months. Two or three months back it seemed to reach a tipping point. It is now no longer the preserve or procrastinating students.

Now Facebook seems to have made itself the social network to be on for sensible grown-up types. I heard it mentioned on the 6 O’Clock News recently — and that really is a sign, I think (have you ever heard LiveJournal (except in the context of “suicidal mad gunman had a LiveJournal”) or even Flickr mentioned on the news?).

It is easy to see why Facebook attracts that kind of audience. MySpace and Bebo are a full-on assault on the eyes (and sometimes ears), not to mention near enough impossible to navigate sensibly. Facebook has your profile in a pleasant blue interface which has a sensible, easy-to-use navigation system. Tweenagers may cry because they can’t put stupid pink glittery things on their profiles — but the rest of us are rejoicing.

But Facebook are not resting on the laurels of their new-found mega-popularity. Because it seems to me as though, of all the social networks out there, Facebook is the only one that does much in the way of innovation — and it does it by the bucketload.

When Facebook opened its doors to everyone, its current members (ie. students) were up in arms. But it turned out to be the key to the site’s eventual popularity.

When Facebook introduced its news feeds, people shrieked about the privacy concerns. But that was a storm in a teacup if ever there was one, because Bebo has subsequently made a weak copy of it without anyone batting an eyelid.

Also, the “privacy concern” completely ignored the fact that Facebook has awesome privacy features that I have never seen anywhere else. For a start, your profile is completely private to anyone outside your “network” (ie. university or geographical region). Then it can be private to people even inside your network. And then you can even have a “limited profile” so that you can even choose which of your friends has access to which information.

In fact, I feel so safe on Facebook that it is the only place on the web where I have ever posted my phone number. Many others even put their address on Facebook, and it doesn’t feel like a concern. Could you imagine putting your postal address on MySpace? I hardly think so.

Facebook’s latest rabbit out of the hat is its brilliant Facebook Platform, and Facebook Apps. They’re a bit like widgets of the sort that you can find on MySpace and Bebo — but really smartly done.

MySpace is famously annoying for having profiles with a million songs and videos autoplaying. Facebook has very cleverly prevented this from happening by requiring visitors to click before anything annoying happens (and then it’s your own fault damnit!). Just in the same way as Facebook has stopped users from having colour schemes that are like daggers in your eyes, they have sensibly taken precautions to make widgets not get in your way.

Once the initial excitement about Facebook Apps died down, I became a bit worried that Facebook would become a bit like MySpace, with annoying widgets in your face everywhere. But now I have no such concerns. I know I will still be able to visit a profile without being confronted by ugliness (I don’t mean the profile pics, BTW).

The other clever thing that Facebook have done is opening up widgets to everyone. On Bebo, the choice of widgets is really weak. If you really love dodgy Flash photo slideshows, you will love Bebo widgets. But anything apart from that? No luck. This is no doubt because, rather bureaucratically (although understandably, given security concerns there might be), Bebo only allows widgets with “approved partners”.

Yet, Facebook has developed a secure “platform” that allows me to embed my information from other websites like Twitter, del.icio.us and (belatedly) Last.fm. In the space of a week, I have not got everything I’ve wanted Facebook allow me to put on my profile.

A bit bizarrely, Facebook gave websites of arse drizzle prominence over Last.fm, who were not given advance notice of the Facebook Platform. Meanwhile, iLike was. Unfortunately, iLike is the most popular Facebook app at the moment. Everytime I see that “one of my friends has added iLike”, I think of this.

Inexplicably, Mog was also given advance notice. Mog is like Last.fm, but it does everything in a much less efficient and more invasive way. And it’s brown.

Anyway, despite the fact that I was unable to put Last.fm on my profile straight away, there is no doubt that Facebook have already set the standard when it comes to widgets — mostly because they have managed to make it so that it isn’t annoying. Widgets are hardly revolutionary. But Facebook have implemented them with such class that it feels revolutionary.

I suppose Facebook also deserve kudos for calling them “applications” rather than the literally meaningless “widgets” (or, even worse, “gadgets” on Windows Vista). Mind you, this is because Facebook say that their applications are more fully-featured that standard widgets anyway, because they integrate into the social graph, whatever that is.

I see it, because the Last.fm application lets me compare my music profile to that of others on Facebook who also use the Last.fm app. Apparently RSSbook shows you what RSS feeds your friends are subscribed to, and suggests feeds that might interest you based on that information.

It is not quite perfect. I would like my Twitter status to automatically become my Facebook status. I would prefer my del.icio.us links to be imported into my “posted items”. But I can understand why they have not allowed this.

All-in-all, sitting here today, it is difficult to see why anyone would want to sign up to a social network that isn’t Facebook. I’ll have more on this in my next post (because this one is already long enough).

Update: Part two has been posted here.