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?

According to the CBI, one in eight absences are by people faking illness. This apparently costs the British economy £1.6bn. The implication is that this is a bad, bad thing. But is it?

I read an article yesterday on The Washington Post’s website. The article got a lot of attention. It was an interesting experiment. An excellent, world-famous violinist — Joshua Bell — posed as a busker at a busy Washington DC metro station.

Of course, normally people would attend a Joshua Bell concert knowing that they were going to see one of the best violinists in the world. In this instance, he is performing in the same environment as a humble busker. Outside Bell’s normal environment, did the commuters notice his talent?

Of course they didn’t. Most of them walked past. Some left spare change. A few stayed around to witness his excellent playing. That probably doesn’t happen to most buskers. But the point stands that the vast majority walked straight past one of the best musicians in the world. A musician that many people would pay good money to watch was being totally ignored at a free, impromptu performance.

The article goes on to ask just why people ignored him. I think we all know the answers. The busy commuters had to get on with their business, and just didn’t have the time or inclination to appreciate the beauty. The article made me quite sad. I wasn’t sad because so many people walked past Joshua Bell. I was sad because I know that I would have walked straight past him as well.

The question to ask is, what is the biggest priority in your life? If earning money is your number one goal that is good for you. But I think you are stupid. In another little coincidence, while I was revising for my exams I read this in one of my economics textbooks, Microeconomic Theory by Walter Nicholson.

Unless the individual is a rather Scrooge-type of person, wealth in its own right gives no direct utility. Rather, it is only when wealth is spent on consumption goods that any utility results.

Yet yesterday I watched a video of lots of people who were fully focussed on accumulating wealth rather than actually enjoying themselves. Could any of them not have spared a second to work out if the busker was worth paying attention to? Could they not have afforded to be five minutes late for work and take time out to enjoy the performance?

Every day I become a bit more disillusioned with the idea that I need to make lots of money. I am conscious of the fact that if I get a job that pays a lot of money, I will probably only end up becoming stressed and having no spare time in which to spend any — never mind all — of my money.

There is a suspicion lurking in the back of my head that people who have moderate to low incomes simply enjoy their life more, while high flyers become stressed out climbing ladders that only have more ladders at the top of them. If this is the case, then the people who are faking illness have the right idea. Bollocks to lots of money. They just want to take some time out to enjoy themselves and relax.

The CBI might be right that fake sickies cost the economy £1.6bn. But they are probably wrong in implying that this is a bad thing. The question to ask is, how much is taking a day off worth to a worker? Probably quite a lot. We all like to enjoy ourselves, and we all experience those days where we just can’t be bothered. The decision we face is between climbing a (metaphorical) mountain or having a lie-in. Easy choice for many.

Personally, I do not pull sickies. Partly this is because I like having a routine. Partly it’s because I know about all of the bitching that goes on behind people’s backs when they phone in sick. Partly it’s because I am a very poor liar. Partly it’s because I feel a bit guilty for all those years when I didn’t have a job (I got my first proper job when I was 20, although I hasten to add that I have always been in full time education, so never technically unemployed).

But in a way I admire those who pull sickies for just doing whatever the hell they want. Often I think I was right to sit on my arse for all those years when I didn’t have a job. After all, the current situation sees me losing almost all of my spare time, and barely spending a penny of the money that I have earned.

So people pulling a sickie might cost the economy £1.6bn. But it probably gains people more than that in enjoyment. The utility derived from these people taking a sneaky day off could well be higher than the utility that would be derived from the £1.6bn that is lost from the economy. Indeed, one of the major lessons of economics is that if it wasn’t, people simply wouldn’t take those days off.