Are you sick and tired of there being too many useless Facebook applications? Wish there were way too many? Well the EZ App Builder is here to grant that wish. The app exists to allow users to create their own applications in minutes with very little trouble, but ultimately it fails in its limitations.

Out of a lack of creativity I created an app that let’s you tell your friends you miss them to let you see what an app you can create looks like. While the instructions given to create your app are surprisingly clear, the EZ App Builder only lets you make one sort of app: the useless kind.

You’re limited to creating an application where users can do a thing to one another, such as tell someone they miss them, or some sort of poke, or the like. It does, however, allow you to easily take advantage of many of the viral tools Facebook offers.

The application that you create is adorned by 4 ads, one of which is your own: the rest belong to the parent application. One of the ads is incredibly poorly placed, right in the center, and reminds the user that the application was made by the EZ App Builder.

It’s definitely neat for a relative layperson to be able to make a custom application with ease. Given the limitations on substance, however, I will be very surprised if any of these simple applications gain any popularity in the long run. It’s relatively new, and they claim that new features will be rolled out shortly, so I think that the EZ App Builder is worth keeping an eye on.

-Jonathan Kleiman is the founder of Probook, Canada’s self-professed quintessential professional network, and CEO of CSSAGLOBAL, an offshore web and software development company based primarily in India and Canada.

I’m not a big application adder on Facebook but I have to tell you I’m loving Blackjack. At first I was annoyed because in order to get cash to play you have to harass your friends and send them invitations but got over it because Blackjack is awesome!

Here’s how it works. You send it out to 20 people and you get $200 ($10 for every invite) and then if they add the application you get $500 for a possible total of $10000 per day. I hate sending applications to friends because I know I don’t like getting them myself. Is it horrible of me that I sent it to people on my list I don’t like that much?

Anyway great application for Blackjack fans. You choose one of many tables with various buy-in amounts and then play with other facebookers. There’s also a chat feature so you can talk with the other players. During my first game there were some pretty “interesting” conversations going on. Quite off topic and fun.

There’s also a great set of instructions if you don’t know how to play.

All it’s really missing now is a way to make actual money. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Leora Zellman writes a million blogs and is also a channel editor at b5media

I find myself writing my first review of a Facebook application: Local Picks by TripAdvisor. From this point on the application will be referred to as LPT since I have no desire to a: type that whole name out again or b: hit ctrl-V to paste in the name of the app (half my readers just scoffed at me for admitting to typing on a PC).

So, who wants to know what I think about restaurants or what dives I spend the most of my time in? Well with the LPT you can be that person! You will also gain the power to see all the restaurants I eat at neatly pointed out on a map in case you want to stake the joints out and see me eat my sad sad meals alone.

That being said you can’t take the map for face value, again I know I am never supposed to talk bad about “the Google” but it has my favorite restaurant being located by Howard University, which it is not, China Town Express is located in China Town of all places (stupid Google).

If I could complain about anything, I can and do thank you, I would like to see a photo upload or photo link function built into this app. I have taken TONS of pictures at restaurants around DC and I would love to show random strangers what I look like eating crab enchiladas at Lauriol Plaza.

I could see this app being fun if you were going to head up to a city you have never really been to and were looking to see what similar minded people thought, but I know my friends, they have horrible taste and will eat about anything. Strangers, well their advice is like dog with no tail: Sure it might look fine from the front, but without a clear indication of what he is thinking you just have to be careful.

-Anthony

Do people even know about the Facebook toolbar for Firefox? I’ve had it installed for quite some time now, and I only realized its unpopularity when some friends came over and were baffled. The toolbar is amazing, and has totally changed how Facebook impacts my life. It can be found at http://developers.facebook.com/toolbar.

The toolbar has all of the features you’d expect. It tells you when you receive a new message and lets you access different parts of the site easily with the click of a button. It also makes it very easy to share the page you’re at on your profile, and you can search Facebook at any time from the top of your browser. It’s very simple and very intuitive.

My favourite feature of the toolbar is that it has msn-like popups that notify you instantly of your friends’ status updates and of new messages or notifications received. I’ve come to like this feature the most because it allows me to find out about what my friends are up to instantaneously. It really lets me be more active with Facebook and to keep up to date with my friends’ activities on the site.

I have a feeling that some people will find the pop-ups a little annoying or intrusive, but they can be turned off and you can limit what you receive notifications about. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Posted by Jonathan Kleiman

This morning I spent some time playing the “Who Has The Biggest Brain” game. This is definitely one of the more entertaining games on Facebook. The application enables you to give your brain a solid workout. It tests you on a number of things including basic math, memory, analytics and others. I started playing it this morning after five hours of sleep and the game said I had the brain the same size as a goat. Goats are kind of intelligent … right?

By the afternoon after a nice lunch and a couple of tries, my brain mass had moved up to that of a neanderthal. Neaderthals were the most intelligent species 350,000 years ago so that has to mean something. While I may not be a master of this game it is fun to play. Another cool part is that you can compare your results with that of your friends. Unfortunately none of my friends had played this yet so I’m not sure how they fared.

If you want to test out your brain against your friends, go grab the “Who has the Biggest Brain application.

One of my biggest Facebook pet peeves is when someone responds to a wall post on their own wall. If you do this, and I know a lot of people do, the person who posted on your wall won’t see your response.

I feel it is my duty to share with you the correct way to respond to a friendly wall post from a friend:

1. Click “Wall-to-Wall” which is found underneith their message.
2. Respond to the wall post and click “post”.

Then they’ll get a notice of your response and you can have a conversation. You can also easily keep track of the messages you have sent back and forth with that friend by clicking wall-to-wall.

So that’s what annoys this gossip blogger.

Oh and stop poking me. I don’t like it!

What’s your Facebook Pet Peeve?

Leora Zellman writes a million blogs and is also a channel editor at b5media

I previously called this feature the “LinkedIn Killer.” Facebook has now added the ability to group your friends into custom groups. You can name each group and create as many groups as you like. While there aren’t custom privacy setting for each list there is a nice feature where you are able to message everyone within each group. Have a group of business contacts that you would like to message? Maybe a group of fans? Now you can finally group each of those people together.

While I believe that the next step would be to have custom privacy settings, this is a great step by Facebook. I am immediately going to go group my friends just as Mark Cuban described last night. This is a really great feature and I’m sure it will help many of us that have a friend list that is way to long (or as some would argue, the insecure group).

Is this feature going to enable you to switch over from LinkedIn?

Facebook has officially begun accepting applications to be part of the Facebook payment system beta test. I have been speculating about a payment system for a long time. This is a significant move for Facebook and one that will lead to the increase in e-commerce application on Facebook. I have been advising many of my e-commerce clients to hold off on launching anything significant until Facebook releases their payment system.

It appears as though Facebook will be releasing this feature in the coming months. I definitely would like to be part of the beta launch. If you do as well, send an email to jmorgenstern [AT] facebook [DOT] com. I can only speculate for now how this is going to work but this could be a massive shift for social commerce. Many in the industry have discussed the pinnacle of e-commerce being social shopping and much of that will potentially take place on Facebook.

Just yesterday I updated my Facebook status with a link to an entertaining t-shirt that I found. Within an hour, one of my friends purchase the shirt and posted a comment on my wall that they had bought the shirt. Social commerce has extremely powerful potential. Thanks to Justin Smith for pointing this out!

Saul Hansel of the New York Times has found his golden application. The Rhapsody music service has just launched a new application that lets you listen to a limited amount of free music and optionally purchase a monthly membership if you choose, ultimately porting their entire service within the confines of the Facebook platform.

What was significant for Paul was the applications ability to automatically import your favorite artists and add them to your Rhapsody playlist. The other thing of significance is that Facebook is creating “an identity that can cross applications.” That’s significant and it is one of the reasons that technologists have been so enthusiastic about the young platform. Could Facebook be the successful version of Microsoft Passport?

I think it could but as Paul points out, there is one issue that hasn’t been solved by Facebook: “using its information off the Facebook site.” This is something that I’ve been hoping for a while. The real challenge is how Facebook will be able to monetize activities off of the Facebook site. Ultimately they won’t be able to. I would argue that this doesn’t matter though because if Facebook becomes the standard for managing “your social graph,” Facebook won’t need to worry about users leaving the Facebook site.

That’s because users will still return to Facebook to manage all of their contacts, view pictures and manage events. Conversely, completely opening up Facebook identity portability would anger platform developers who could return to building websites on the outside. While I believe that Facebook will not embrace portable identities in the near future I do see it as an eventual necessity if Facebook wishes to maintain their dominance in the social networking arena.

The end of Paul’s article was interesting in that he has ultimately admitted that he has become a Facebook convert. He still believes in the “Golden Application” that I have spoken about for so long. As he says, “With so much energy devoted to Facebook, there will be a lot of effort to create more useful applications, rather than merely cute ones. If Facebook can relax its rules some and pay attention to the privacy concerns of its users, it is still in a great position to solve some vexing problems for both users and entrepreneurs.”

The bottom line is that Facebook is nowhere near the end of their reign as the leader in social networking innovation. Do you think Facebook will maintain this leadership position by eventually making Facebook identities and connections transportable to other websites?

Shel Israel argues that Facebook’s revenue ideas have gone from awful to worse. He has compared Facebook to “an old college romance. It was torrid at first and I thought it was true love. But then there came a series of unpleasant surprises in her behavior. One morning I woke up and discovered she who had been so lovely so recently had become downright ugly to me.” While I’m not sure about Shel’s analogy I have begun to wonder how Facebook is going to grow their revenue.

Currently, Facebook’s model appears to be perfect the “social graph” first and build a revenue stream later. Facebook is estimated to be bringing in $150 million in revenue and is sitting on a significant amount of cash. I have to wonder if Facebook’s future revenue models will be successful or if they will fail horribly. While people have utilized Facebook polls and have tested out Facebook SocialAds, their advertising system has not gone mainstream. So what will be Facebook’s primary revenue source?

It appears that SocialAds is Facebook’s primary monetization tool. While people have complained of Facebook’s horrendous click-thru rate, those clicks are by highly targeted individuals. One person that I spoke with at the Web Community Forum in Seattle said that they were having great success. While the click-thru rates were extremely low, their conversion rate was extremely high (above 60 percent). If that’s the case, SocialAds may be a success.

Conversely, Facebook’s attempt to derive revenue from their new Pages offering is a poor one. As a business, why would I opt to rely completely on SocialAds and newsfeed items to drive users to my brand’s page? What happened to user invites that the free groups already offer? I definitely think Facebook should rethink their Pages offering. Unfortunately, I don’t have statistics as to the performance of Pages but I would assume that the Facebook Pages have not been as widely adopted as Facebook Groups. Am I off base here?

Can Facebook generate billions of dollars in revenue? Perhaps. At this point any equation that I provide which justifies $1 billion a year in revenue would be totally inaccurate as it is limited to speculation. While I think that Facebook’s revenue model will be successful at generating a significant amount of revenue for the company, I’m doubtful that it will live up to the hype generated by Facebook’s $15 billion valuation. What do you think?