Are there any Facebook apps that aren’t pathetically lame? Just wondering. Also wondering, why do I have to update my Facebook status, my Twitter status, and my chat status in three different places? Which means that usually I don’t. [Update: Wanna change your status just once for everwhere? MoodBlast is da bomb! Thanks, Dion.]
Contributions
September 07, 2007
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Web (396 more)
· The World (148 fragments)
· · Life Online (273 more)
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Web (396 more)
· The World (148 fragments)
· · Life Online (273 more)
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Louis (Sep 07 2007, at 10:34)
Ugh, I think I'm coming down with a case of social/network/website dementia. I find myself on multiple sites, like facebook, twitter, etc. and I love what little things they do but goodness, can we all just get a long.
Can't we have one place to rule them all?
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From: Ciaran Lee (Sep 07 2007, at 10:46)
I quite like the 'Friend Wheel', it shows connections between your facebook contacts. I have heard the scrabble app is good too. Most seem to be incredibly lame, and they basically spam you with requests to add superextracoolwall etc...
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From: Doug McCarthy (Sep 07 2007, at 10:53)
What is Facebook actually for? I mean, I've signed up, got my account, now what? As far as I can tell, my goal is to acquire as many "friends" that I've never met as possible. Are there points for most friends collected or something?
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From: Anonymous Coward (Sep 07 2007, at 10:56)
<em>Also wondering, why do I have to update my Facebook status, my Twitter status, and my chat status in three different places?</em>
because you don't use adium, and/or haven't written code to make your IM client handle it for you?
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From: Ben Meadowcroft (Sep 07 2007, at 10:57)
I'd recommend the video application for sharing videos with family (one of facebook's own apps) and the political compass is quite good as well. Most of it is pointless "spam" type apps which try contact as many of your friends as possible, occasionally interesting, but a quite mindless most of the time.
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From: Guillermo (Sep 07 2007, at 11:02)
I only have 2 apps: Twitter and Powncer, and I stopped updating my Facebook status. I just update Twitter and/or Pownce, depending on the message length. If the message is less than 140 characters or particularly inane, I update Twitter, else I update Pownce. Or I might update both, if it's something interesting.
But to answer your first question, no, I think there aren't any un-lame Facebook apps.
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From: Steve Bedrick (Sep 07 2007, at 11:20)
For what it's worth, I've just put together an application that lets you list your Medline-indexed publications on your profile page, and also lets you easily see any publications that your friends have listed on theirs.
http://apps.facebook.com/medlinepublications/
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From: alecm (Sep 07 2007, at 11:21)
you've read this?
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/facebook-opening-up-but-on-its-own-terms/
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From: Gord Broom (Sep 07 2007, at 11:51)
To me, the del.icio.us facebook plugin doesn't seem pathetically lame. It just installs quietly and stays out of the way, publishing changes to your del.icio.us bookmarks on your profile.
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From: Alex P. (Sep 07 2007, at 12:02)
Sounds like you want http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/download/moodswing/
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From: Michael Daines (Sep 07 2007, at 12:04)
I think one protocol (an informal one?) might be better than one place. Or a few simple ways of relating lots of little places.
People (incl. me!) derisively call Facebook a "walled garden", but it in addition to being walled, I think I often forget that it is also a garden: people hang out there, things grow, etc.
Is it possible to make gardens with lower walls?
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From: John Kemp (Sep 07 2007, at 12:09)
Well, there is the (desktop-only) solution http://www.8hands.com... Although, personally I am leaning towards abandoning Facebook and their ilk entirely as I hope to consolidate "things I say about myself" on my /own/ website (see http://appliedlife.blogspot.com/2007/09/facebook-opens-profiles-to-public_06.html for one new reason to do this)
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From: Anthony (Sep 07 2007, at 12:29)
A common presence framework has been the goal for years, but it will never happen. They can't make money off of you if you don't go to their website.
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From: Nick Fagerlund (Sep 07 2007, at 12:29)
You know, I actually quite like Visual Bookshelf, although it's a little too vigorous about pushing you to the buy page at Amazon.
I've never kept any other apps long enough to use them twice.
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From: Greg (Sep 07 2007, at 12:51)
The Last.fm application to show recent songs is the only *good* application I've seen so far. There are a couple that I use, despite being frustrated by the interface.
What continues to piss me off is that the applications insist on trying to get me to virally spread it to everyone I know. I don't want to spam my friends. Worse yet is that a lot of the applications are useless to people who don't also have that application installed. If I want to see someone's slideshow/booklist/whatever, why should I install the application?
I like messing with my status regularly, but I don't use twitter, so that problem doesn't hit me. Ideally, one could have a little desktop application that could push the same status to all those services. Mugshot - http://mugshot.org/ - is supposed to be an aggregator, but I don't know if it would handle the pushing to each of the services.
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From: Dion Almaer (Sep 07 2007, at 13:05)
Have you seen MoodBlast (http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/download/moodswing/)?
It sets all status services at once ;)
Cheers,
Dion
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From: S. (Sep 07 2007, at 13:25)
Hi,
I was wondering if anybody knows a "social application" for researchers who participate in conferences worldwide. There are some specific needs in this context: publications, events, topics.
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From: Lennon (Sep 07 2007, at 13:43)
Strangely enough, the Facebook apps that people seem to actually like (last.fm, Flickr, del.icio.us) are the ones that make your Facebook profile page act the most like a simple aggregator pulling feeds from other sites.
It's just the "personalized homepage" idea, turned inside-out: all your content collected in one place for other people's convenience.
The interactive apps that actually build on your social network (see: stupid "Zombie" games, the various "cause" and "politics" promotions, etc.) tend to just be annoying and, as Tim said, lame.
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From: Joe Mahoney (Sep 07 2007, at 15:05)
I've been playing a lot of Scrabulous via Facebook. It integrates nicely into yr friends list & the notification system.
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From: Mark Lee (Sep 07 2007, at 16:21)
Yeah, you Mac guys are lucky. I'm currently trying to hack out a way to do it for Linux (and Windows) via a Pidgin plugin.
In my quest to find a method to set the facebook status programatically, I encountered <http://nexdot.net/blog/2007/04/20/updating-facebook-status-using-php/>, where you may find the actions of Facebook a little disturbing.
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