Do you use iGoogle as your startpage? If so, there is a great application (developed by Jeffery Ravenhorst) so that you can view Facebook without having to go to the site. My good friend Frank Gruber pointed out the application to me a couple of weeks ago, but it just recently got added to the directory. The application allows you to view all of your Facebook information from one widget. I feel like the existence of this application is somewhat of an oxymoron given that it seems as though Facebook would like to be your startpage. If you use iGoogle as your browser startpage, this application is for you. Go grab the Google Gadget application to get started!

Aryeh Goldsmith is still launching applications at a rapid pace. His new application is to help support fellow developers. It is the application link exchange. Any developer can add the application, submit their application to the link exchange and place a small snippit of FBML to their splash page and they are good to go. It is a pretty simple application to get free promotion. I honestly don’t know how well this application would work, but it would be interesting to get some statistics on the application’s effect. Given that people already place a limited number of applications on their profile, will this really have any impact? I think that the concept behind this application is pretty slick but I’m skeptical of the result. Additionally, I’m not sure of the delay in having your application added to the directory. I have submitted my Bush Countdown Clock to the directory but I have yet to see it featured. If you are a Facebook developer and want to gain mutually beneficial application promotion from other developers, go grab the Link Exchange application.

A few of my friends have decided to switch from using Twitter to simply updating their Facebook status from their mobile phone. Whether you are contemplating making the switch or still debating what to do, Austin Thomas Griffith has made an application so you don’t have to decide. FBTwit is a simple application that automatically updates your Twitter with your Facebook status. I have a feeling applications like this one will become priceless that have their updates distributed across a number of disconnected networks. I have yet to make the shift to Facebook and chose just to put Twitter on my Facebook profile. This would definitely be a good alternative though saving me precious space on my Facebook profile. I think it is time to make the switch. For those of you that are still deciding which network to use for keeping your friends up to date, or for those that are bogged down with making updates on both sites, go grab the FBTwit application and make your life a little easier.

If you are one of those that waited in line to get your iPhone today and are successful, it’s time to show off your new gadget! Steven Bao had the catchy idea of creating an application that allows you to show one of twelve badges on your profile. Want to make your friends jealous? Let them know that you’ve got the goods. I have a feeling though that a large chunk of iPhones will end up sold on eBay for somewhere in the $2000 range. Chances are, if you are reading this blog you are not going to be getting an iPhone today. Do you have plans to get an iPhone? I surely don’t but there are millions of people trying to get one! If you happen to be one of the lucky people that get their hands on the iPhone, go grab the iPhone application.

According to a Financial Times article, MySpace is following Facebook’s lead and opening up their platform. I have been saying for weeks that other platforms are going to be forced to open up. I even broke the rumor that LinkedIn is considering opening their platform as well. One major question is whether or not it is too late for MySpace? It definitely isn’t too late. MySpace has over 100 million daily visitors and it is still growing. Development shops are rapidly going to pop-up who provide general social network development services. When your company wants to launch a promotion they are going to have to create a Facebook application, MySpace widget, and iGoogle gadget. I’m sure other social networks will eventually catch on. While it will take MySpace at least 6-9 months to get to the platform level of Facebook, this is still a huge move.

I have had the fortune to speak with one of the most successful developers on Facebook, David Gentzel. David has personally developed over 4 applications, many of which have been extremely successful. I interviewed David to get his input on the success of many Facebook applications.

How many applications have you developed for the Facebook platform and what applications are they?

So far, I’ve developed Food Fight, Trakzor, Tag, Kudos, and a few other small ones. I was working in a small team on another project when F8 hit. At that point, I became the exploratory committee and came back with some great discoveries. Now we’re all participating in the development of new social applications and have several exciting ones in the works.

What are your best performing applications?

Food Fight is the big winner so far. Though, Trakzor took off and was growing at close to 10k users per hour, but that quickly slowed down once people understood it wasn’t a Facebook profile tracker

Have you been able to monetize any of your applications yet?

Growth first, business model second My partners are much more business savvy than I am. I worry about getting users and they focus on monetizing them in clever ways.

How many offers have you received to get acquired?

Depressingly, only one, and it wasn’t even a real purchase offer. I only had the opportunity to move and work on someone else’s ticket reservation Facebook app. Oh well…

What challenges have you faced in developing and maintaining your applications?

Deep breath….

There was a need to get in quickly, you know…before the other 10k people finished their apps. This required cutting a lot of corners and making the right judgment calls. What products? How complete? How sophisticated? Launched in what order? Lots of mind wrenching there. The short answer was, “Keep it simple.”

Additionally, something about me doesn’t like spamming people. Yes, 2.5 million of you have gotten food thrown at you. In turn, you received a notification. But, that’s because someone, with whom you are friends with, singled you out, spent his own (not so) hard earned lunch money, and splatted you with something digitally delicious. There were no “mass invitations” sent out, nor was there dirty co-registration. The only time anyone received anything was on a one-to-one basis where there was direct and personal meaning attached to the message. Others’ applications…not so much.

It’s pretty easy to spread something when all the app does is send out 100 messages to your other friends telling them something that isn’t totally true in order to get them to install the application and send out 100 more messages. Facebook finally caught on and because this functionality was abused, it was basically turned off for everyone, but only after the big guys amassed millions of users and secured a stronghold over facebook app land.

Now, there are application beasts and a lot of soon-to-be prey. That’s not to say that the big guys don’t deserve a lot for what they’ve done. Spam or not, they got millions of users to install applications, and unless those same users uninstall them, then that speaks for itself. And, frankly, it wasn’t as if they circumvented Facebook’s rules or were breaking the law. My jaw dropped at the F8 convention as Zuckerberg went through spam tool, after spam tool, after spam tool….all available to anyone. But, now, the fact that many, if not most, of the applications that are coming out would have been 100k user successes if they launched day one and had reasonable access to these tools seems pretty unruly. Being big is generally enough to win. Being big and being pre-selected to feast on the richest means of social distribution ever provided, which now allows them to feast on the ideas of the poppers, or the poppers themselves, seems borderline cruel on the part of facebook.

So, while this isn’t a “I had to load balance a few servers” problem, this is far and away the biggest issue every developer will face trying to compete inside facebook.

What future plans do you have for developing on the Facebook platform?

Our team will continue to pursue new and innovative facebook applications as long as it makes sense to do so. Social flaws aside, it’s an amazing technical platform and is truly a huge step in the realm of social networks….errr….social graphs.

Remember the days when you couldn’t access Friendster because the site wasn’t loading? How about the annoying page on Facebook saying that they were performing server maintenance? This morning I received a message stating the following: “Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” What the hell? Don’t you know that I have a blog to maintain? This is completely unacceptable. I have to be honest, I kind of thought that Facebook was invisible to the troubles of past social networks. Looks like they may not be. Darn it! Guess I’ll just have to weather the storm.

Valleywag has the story directly from a platform developer stating that Facebook has placed restrictions limiting how viral an application can become. One of the primary sources of data that this developer uses to express his frustration with how viral an application can be is that 1% of the last 500 applications approved have over 100,000 users. This is truly some funny math. While it may be true, how many developers can expect their totally useless application to be rapidly adopted by hundreds of thousands if not millions of users? Not many. It is truly time for developers to lower their expectations. I can understand Facebook’s rationale behind their decision to limit the number of invites.

Top tier applications with large feature sets sell them self. They are not at the mercy of user invites. When I see that one of my friends added an application to their profile, that is my primary reason for adding an application. Well maybe not me personally given that I am constantly browsing the never ending supply of new Facebook applications, but most users. I have seen way to many applications listed that aren’t worth the time to cover. Other blogs (which will go unnamed) may not be as picky but I surely am not going to cover the majority of these applications. Bottom line, crappy applications no longer have a chance. The land grab of weeks of ago is rapidly coming to an end.

The developer states the following:

Put in other terms, the largest application (Top Friends by Slide, which has 7 million members) has several times more members than the last 500 apps combined.

Duh! It takes time for an application to get adopted. Unfortunately there have been more and more ridiculously pointless applications coming out from one man shops. One man shops are going to begin facing some much bigger competition. The next argument of this Facebook developer is as follows:

But the other reason for this dramatic decline, and this is what pisses me and a lot of other developers in the Valley off, is that Facebook just recently unceremoniously undercut the very thing that was driving the virality of most the initial applications , which is the ability of people to invite all their friends to an application.

Like I previously mentioned, the virality of an application is ultimately not determined by how many people are invited, but how useful the application is. If your application isn’t useful and 10 million people have it, it won’t stay that way for much longer. The last issue that the Facebook developer had is below:

In a related minor but hugely impactful move, Facebook also recently started asking users if they want each application to appear in their news feed, on their profile, or on their side toolbar when they add an application, causing a lot of people to opt-out of this.

Umm … wasn’t this already there? If not I’m glad it was added. For my own personal privacy sake I would like to have more control of how applications interact with my profile. That’s the bottom line. Finally, this particular developer expressed his rationale for his frustration:

The reason this pisses me and many other people I’ve been talking with over the past day or so off is because dozens if not hundreds of startups in the Valley who made a strategic decision to divert valuable resources over the past month to develop a Facebook app did so with the understanding that we would have access to the same viral tools that all the initial applications had access to.

Anyone that launched their business based on Facebook applications knows completely what they are getting in to. This is the concept of measured risk. The majority of venture capital funded companies go out of business and that is a fact of life. This developer in particular is not exactly the most business savvy. I’ve alway enjoyed the phrase, “Don’t hate the player, hate the game.” In this case the players are entrepreneurs and developers and Facebook has control over the game. That’s the risk they take.

Bottom line, Faceboook will continue modifying their platform. As they make changes, some people will get squeezed out which is natural. The only people that will be left standing in the end are those that truly develop valuable and robust applications. Without a value-added proposition, Facebook applications are completely worthless. It sounds to me like the developer in this specific case is unhappy because his application wasn’t successful. Tough luck!

Tired of playing games on your XBox 360, Playstation 3, or on your computer? Bring back the 80s with the original Nintendo NES. The Free NES application, created by Lance Strish, provides hundreds of Nintendo games. Some of my favorites are on there such as all the Megaman games, Mario 3, Castlevania, and Zelda. The only issue that I had when running the application was that sound can make game play a little choppy. Aside from that it was pretty decent game play. Instead of the classing “A” and “B” buttons that are on the original Nintendo Game controller, you use the “Z” and “X” buttons. Additionally, the buttons are switched around since the directional keypad is on the right hand side. I’m not sure if a gamepad would work with this, but if it did it would be pretty sweet. I have an original Nintendo sitting in my apartment. Any other NES fans out there? If you want to play Nintendo on Facebook, go grab the Free NES application.

For those of you who don’t know about Greasemonkey yet you are in for a fantastic surprise. Greasemonkey is an add-on for Firefox which lets you do all sorts of hacky little things. Get Greasemonkey here.

I got sick of having to log in to Facebook all the time, so I hunted for a Greasemonkey script to fix it for me.

While I was hunting I found some really cool Facebook hacks:

• The Facebook Auto-Login Script is the most useful.
• There’s a script to add Facebook events to your Google calendar.
• Facebookpedia shows Wikipedia info for interests when you hover over them.
• Facebook AIM status icon shows you when your facebook friends are using AIM.

There are SO many great Facebook-Greasemonkey scripts. If you want to check them out yourself, userscripts.org has a full collection of Greasemonkey-Facebook hacks . Check them out!