Entries Tagged 'Facebook Applications' ↓

While Facebook is primarily a social networking tool, its uses have expanded to provide other functional services as well. For example, you can use Facebook applications to find things in or near your hometown. Here’s a few I found useful:

Cribot

This is a simple bot that searches Craigslist apartment listings based on search criteria you specify. Rather than obsessively refreshing Craigslist every hour, you can just log into Facebook at the end of each day and see what results the bot has collected for you. Of course, those of us who live in cities where there’s deadly competition for good places might not be able to wait until the end of the day before a listing gets snatched up, but in general this looks like a useful tool.

Local Picks

Local Picks is an app from Trip Advisor. This is what started this post; my dad’s coming to the city to have lunch with me and I was looking for someplace new we could go. Local Picks compiles more than 200,000 user-submitted reviews and recommendations of more than 170,000 restaurants in several different countries.

Action Sports

The developers put it best: “If you snowboard, ski, skateboard, surf, mountain bike, bmx, motocross, or wakeboard, this is the app for you.” This app lets you list the places that you go to play. It also provides handy side stuff like snow reports, videos and ratings.

And, of course, you can always turn to local groups to connect with fellow enthusiasts. For example, if you live in my town, you can check out Gardening in the fog to share tips with other growers on what and when to plant in this climate; The Wine Tasting Group, which offers reviews of local wines; or I Want Things to Do In San Francisco, which offers activities and sight seeing suggestions.

Or go global, if you prefer. Groups such as Support the Monk’s Protest in Burma, Protest against huge student loans interest rate hike, or Pro-Test – Supporting Animal Research offer wider views of what people are up to.

I sometimes read complaints from people about the all-inclusiveness of online friendships. While it’s okay to avoid friendship with people in real life, it somehow seems much ruder to reject their friend requests on social networking sites like Facebook. So we wind up with long lists of “friends” we don’t necessarily like, or even know in real life. Maybe this is the reason Facebook has so many “judge me” applications. By putting yourself and your friends through these additional hoops, you can establish in-groups even in the all-accepting world of online friendships. You can figure out who really likes you, and make it clear who you really like.

The best examples are applications that allow you to categorize your friends, like Compare People, which lets you label friends as “cutest,” “sexiest,” “funniest,” etc. But it’s very much a rating system, asking you questions like “who would you rather travel with?” and “who is cooler?” and presenting you with two random options from your friend list.

Compare People leads you to the application called Circle of Trust, which I find almost sinister. Going systematically through your friend list, you are asked to rate the trustworthiness of each friend. Then you can find out who trusts you. It would have been a very useful application in junior high, and it’s probably useful now if you’ve got three hundred friends you need to differentiate between.

And just in case you need one final way to determine who your real friends are, you can check out the answers people give about you on Friend Advisor. This app asks you questions about your friends like “How should X dress?” and “What would you advise X about his political views?” Nice, innocuous topics on which to give your friends unsolicited advice, right? But I guess this can help you figure out who your real friends are, i.e. the ones who don’t tell you that you dress like a homeless guy and need to seriously lighten up with the political stuff.

Cartoon Me is a fantastic way for Facebook users to animate themselves and put a picture of themselves on their Facebook profile. Moreover, they can also compare themselves with their look-alikes. Cartoon Me is a great way to animate yourself.

The application has been created by Funazon which creates self-expression utilities map the "social cartoon."
Like all other Facebook applications it is free of cost

As the first generation of Facebook users gets older, Facebook applications are popping up that weren’t around initially. Now you can even plan your wedding on Facebook.

 One option is Wedding Book, which basically lets you create a profile page for your wedding as if it were a living thing. And in this weird age of the big-time wedding industry, a bride-to-be – who may spend two years or more in the planning stage – may indeed start to feel that her wedding is alive, in a scary Frankenstein kind of way. Wedding Book offers a Wedding Wall, fields where you can enter the names of your wedding party (only ten initially, but don’t worry, you can add more), and fields for basic info like location, date and, of course, registry.

Cool as it is, Wedding Book doesn’t offer a lot of help with the difficult planning stages. For that you need other applications: for example, Wedding Budget, which will take the total amount you’re willing to spend and the total number of guests, then helps you divide your budget neatly into how much you can spend on food, drinks, etc. Side note: the default budget is $25,000. And if you don’t find that a little heartbreaking, well…you’ve probably been planning your wedding for two years and are losing perspective. 

If you don’t like either of these options, you might check out My Wedding Notes, which bills itself as “the world’s first group wedding planner.” Because it takes a village to plan a wedding. “Share your wedding joy with your friends and plan your wedding night!” the app urges. Hopefully you’re not sharing your wedding night joy with your friends. Although who am I to judge?

 This application lets you share ideas and photos with your friends. Also, polls are involved, although since I didn’t want to create an account with MyWeddingNotes.com, I can’t be sure how that plays out.

 Though it sounds a little silly, probably because that’s the tone I’m using to describe it, I imagine this would actually be a useful tool. My best friend was recently a maid of honor and my understanding is that you spend several years emailing with the bride every day about everything from venues to dresses to food to dresses to guest lists to dresses. (This is where the photo sharing will come in handy.) You might as well have a wedding central you can log into instead of keeping it all stored on your email account.

As Facebook users get older, I look forward to seeing what else pops up on the site. Pre-school profiles? Groups called “I sent my kid to an ivy league school and all I got was this lousy Facebook group”? Portals to denture manufacturers? We have so much to look forward to.

As traditional media outlets get more and more het up about this internet fad that’s stealing all their readers and viewers, ABC News has decided to do something about it. Today marks the launch of the ABC Facebook platform, US Politics. 

You would not expect one of these fearful media giants to have embraced the internet so wholeheartedly, but it’s obvious, browsing through the application, that ABC News hired good people to create their Facebook presence. 

For one thing, they’ve cottoned on to an important fact: both Facebook users and voters care about what everyone else is doing. Thus, when you pick which politicians you support on the application, you also have the option of seeing who your friends support. Although they do include a polling section which maps out who Facebook users are supporting and it doesn’t seem to entirely mesh with the real world as laid out in Gallup polls. Kucinich has a much higher percentage of support than I think he’ll have on election day, for example. On the other hand, the graph doesn’t include Stephen Colbert at all. 

I also give this application big points for including a voter registration link on the home page, and a way to remind your friends to register. In addition, the page offers headlines and video news and mini-feeds from the reporters and politicians you’re following. 

Now, to the problems. At present there are still some kinks to be worked out. The sorting function to choose politicians and reporters has some broken fields, and some fields that only have one choice in them. (Interestingly, there’s a field to sort reporters by network. At present only ABC reporters are on the list, but it suggests they’ll be adding external reporters as well at some point.) 

A bigger problem for me is that the “debate groups” are actually just multiple-choice surveys about hot-button issues. I love graphical data representation as much as the next girl, but ABC needs to remember that people love the internets because the internets allow us have our say. Unlike, say, watching ABC News, where we are a passive audience. This is the biggest flag that this application was created by traditional media. A few bulletin boards or chat rooms would be easy to add, and a couple of moderators don’t cost much. Otherwise, ABC is going to find Fox News coming in with their own application that lets thirteen year olds actually do all the reporting and pretty soon it’ll be “ABC who?”

As the writers’ strike stretches on with no end in sight, some of us have begun to fiend for doses of our favorite TV shows. In my case, not having actual cable, the only show I can be bothered to download every week is The Office…but, believe me, I’m missing it.

As with every other problem you have, Facebook can help. Desperately searching for some way to bring The Office back into my life, I went hunting for applications that could sate my Officey appetite, at least for a few hours. Here’s what I found:

What Office Character Are You?

Like many similar quizzes, this application’s questions focus more on making you laugh with favorite Office trivia rather than really trying to determine your personality. Unless discovering your affiliation for a George Foreman grill is a cutting-edge tool in personality research, which, to be fair, is not really my field.

For the record, I, like almost half the people who took the quiz, am Jim Halpert, but I think that’s only because the sluggish halfwit accountant character named Kevin was not an option.

I’m not saying I’m halfwitted. But I really don’t test well.

Addicted to The Office

If you can’t be bothered to take the quiz, you might try adding Addicted to The Office, an application that puts favorite Office quotations and trivia and pictures and stuff on your profile. My feeling is, if you add this, you are pretty much coming out as Dwight Schrute. But since he’s easily the most entertaining character, I really feel that is okay.

Schruteisms

This brings us to my final find, Schruteisms. As you can imagine, this app provides you with cycling quotes from El Schrute, presented by his Dwight-shaped bobblehead doll. It also offers a discussion board where you can love on all things Dwight with other obsessed fans. Finally, something to do with my now empty Thursday nights!

If you, too, suffer from the loss of a dopey TV show that made you oh-so-happy, I suggest a quick browse through the Facebook applications to perk yourself up. And if you find something golden, leave it in the comments.

In more a serious vein, if you want to support the writers, you can sign the online petition here. Want to know what this is all about? Check out the Wiki page.

I keep getting X’d. I’m sure you’re all getting X’d as well; some of you are maybe being X’d as you read this.

The application known as X Me is a logical response to the whimsy of the Facebook poke.  Many a time have I been asked by a neophyte Facebook user, “What’s with this poke thing? Does it do something? Is it good or bad?” (Okay, once somebody asked that.)

The poke, as you know, is simply a ‘what’s up’ you can throw at your friends; it’s a sillier version of the head-jerking guy nod that acknowledges the presence of other people without doing anything so committal as engaging them in conversation. It’s kind of the best way to let your more distant Facebook friends know that you remember they’re alive. Or to remind them that you are.

 But some of you (and you know who you are) have poked your friends so often that it doesn’t seem fun anymore. For you, there is X Me, where you can hug, bite, slap, annoy or give beer to your friends, and much more. X Me also features holiday-themed X’s. For example, around Thanksgiving, you can throw a pumpkin at someone, pray for them, shop with them, etc.

 My personal favorite action is “love,” and not only because I was raised by hippies. I like “love” because, unlike the others, it’s not exactly an action. It is a verb, they got that right. But to “love” your friends isn’t like “throwing a football” at them. Except, and this is why I so enjoy it, the way I love my friends really is like I’m throwing a football at them. A big, gleeful football made of me.

 It’s these little discoveries of other Facebook people who think like me that makes this all worthwhile.