Last week there was a fair amount of buzz about a new application that launched on Facebook called Signal Patterns. The application is essentially an advanced personality test. So advanced that it took me a good hour to complete the test so I definitely don’t recommend this application for anybody that has attention deficit disorder. 100 questions later I had my personality figured out and I have to say that it’s pretty accurate.

Apparently I am assertive, efficient, innovative, extroverted and organized. While I’m not sure that I needed a personality test to tell me that about myself, it’s nice to have my thoughts on myself validated. The other features of this application is the ability to see what friends you are like and what other people on Facebook are like you. You can also contrast your personality traits against others which is interesting to read.

I think that this personality test does a great job and highly recommend checking it out. I think the next step for this application is to build it into a dating application, matching individuals up with compatible personality traits. Aside from that, I’m not sure how this application will attract people back on a regular basis. If you want to find out more about your personality, check out the Signal Patterns Facebook application.

Yesterday there was a ridiculous amount of hoopla about the new Visa Business Network application. The buzz all started with an Associated Press (AP) article which resulted in numerous blogs and news outlets covering the story. I honestly have no idea how Visa was able to get so much buzz going about a custom application that they’ve developed. Supposedly they are investing $2 million in advertising this application but so far less than 1,000 people have installed the application.

The application is designed to let small business owners promote their company within the Visa application. So how is this useful to small businesses, you ask? It’s not! I tried using the application and it didn’t work the first time around. The one benefit of installing this application is that the first 20,000 businesses that register get $100 to spend on Facebook Ads. I tried adding my business to this directory to get the free $100 in SocialAds but for some reason it didn’t register my company.

20 minutes later I’ve given up and am moving on. If there is one thing to learn about this campaign, it’s that spending $2 million to promote your application gets you a lot of press but it doesn’t necessarily get you a lot of application installs. They should instead invest in an install campaign to get some traffic going. If you want a free $100 for ads on Facebook go install the Visa Business Network application. Don’t blame me though if it doesn’t work!

Last year I raved about the potential of a possible Blackboard application. If you don’t already know, Blackboard is the educational tool that is ubiquitous across college institutions within the United States. The company sells a platform which helps educational institutions build robust systems for teaching. Teachers and students share documents and can have course discussions within course-specific forums. Professors can also post grades for assignments and courses. I previously suggested that integration with Facebook would be ideal because it’s where students are spending a ton of their time.

October marked the launch of Coursefeed, which provided integration with Blackboard and a direct interface within Facebook. The application has since added over 13,000 users. 6 months later, Blackboard has launched their own application which is nowhere near as robust as the Coursefeed application. The purpose of the application is to notify students of changes within Blackboard via Facebook.

Have a new assignment posted to one of your courses? Now you can read about it within Facebook. You’ll receive a notification with a link to the corresponding page within Blackboard. You can also navigate through all the top level information pertaining to each course. This includes links to the profiles of other course mates. The application appears to be well built aside from a Java error that I received when entering false information into the fields.

The application also highlights Blackboard’s desire to keep the majority of the content within their platform. This is most likely for security purposes. Resistance to integration with Facebook is commonplace among other enterprise level applications due to the lack of security and exposure of data to Facebook. If you are a Blackboard user and want to get notifications of Blackboard info in Facebook, check out the Blackboard Sync application.

Some people say that beauty in on the inside. The people over at nip/tuck believe that beauty comes in the number 1.618. While I’m not so sure about the accuracy of this number, nip/tuck has built an application which tests to see if you face comes close to the golden ratios. The application lets you select a photo from your albums and test out your beauty.

I didn’t have a proper portrait to test but I’m sure it would have come out a perfect 1.618 This application could be pretty controversial and as such I would have imagined it to gain some more substantial traction but so far the application has reached less than 3,000 people. The application also had a problem with zooming in to my my photo large enough. I’m not surprised that this application wasn’t successful because it has absolutely no social feature whatsoever.

It just goes to show that no matter what your brand is, it doesn’t mean your application will be successful. I think that they could have potentially made this application into some sort of beauty contest and offered rewards of some sort but all they really ended up producing was an ineffective flash application. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to gain much value out of using this application and I don’t think other users were able to either. If you want to have a shot at it and see if you can extract some sort of value from the application, go install the nip/tuck golden ratio application.

Asia has been one of the leaders in monetizing social networks. How are they making money? Virtual goods. Those virtual goods are sold so users can build virtual houses, clothe their virtual avatars and a number of other things. I’ve found one of the first avatar worlds on Facebook called, Fresbo world. The application provides you with an avatar that you can proceed to purchase clothing, furnish your apartment and play games with.

Currency in the game comes in the form of points and credits. The credits can be purchased and the points are earned. The only way to earn points currently is through a game called “Pass the Bomb.” Pass the bomb is a game of chance with a little bit of strategy. All you have to do is guess what number is under the bomb and based on the number you think it is, you ad 1, 2 or 3 clicks to the counter each turn. If the counter reaches the number under the bomb during your turn, the bomb explodes and you lose points.

I’m embarrassed to say that I played “Pass the Bomb” for a solid hour this morning. Honestly, the game is not that unique and it isn’t challenging. I just found it interesting that I could use the points I earned during the game to go purchase more goods from the local shopping mall. Currently there is only 1 village in the game and it’s called “Noob Villiage.” Given that the game is in beta they will be adding a lot of features.

I can see people figuring out a way to pour a lot of time into this virtual world, the same way people spend time on second life. While there is not as much customization as there is within second life, there is enough for those looking to have fun and waste time. I’ve argued that there is no real point to second life in conversation with my friends and ultimately there is really no point to Fresbo world except for building up your avatar’s inventory and wasting time playing games.

Perhaps I’m just frustrated that I don’t get paid real dollars to play games in real life. Either way, Fresbo world is a great application if you are looking to waste some free time or get sucked in to building up your own virtual character. If you are interested, go check out the Fresbo World application.

A Store in Fresbo World

Pass the Bomb Game

This past weekend I was browsing through the Facebook applications directory and came across the “Send Ben & Jerry’s” application. My initial response was that this is yet another gift giving application. I then noticed that close to 4,000 people had used the application the previous day and almost 200,000 people had installed the application. This is an impressive number for a general Facebook application.

The reality is that non-generic versions of standard Facebook applications can actually succeed. Apparently popular brands can produce simple applications that grow virally. I would have thought that gift giving applications have already been dominated but it appears as though some applications are still figuring out ways to launch and succeed. What extra features does the Ben & Jerry’s application provide that traditional gift giving applications doesn’t already have?

Truthfully, not much. The one addition is the ability to unlock other gifts based on the volume of ice cream that you send to your friends. I decided not to barrage my friends with a bunch of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream goodness but it looks like a lot of other people are. If you want to send ice cream to your friends as well, check out the Send Ben & Jerry’s application.

Facebook chat rolled out yesterday but apparently some users are already tired of it. Jesse Stay just contacted me to tell me about a new greasemonkey script that he hacked together that blocks chat for Facebook users. Personally, I’ve kind of enjoyed the limited amount of Facebook chat experience I’ve had so far aside from the fact that it’s limited to the browser. I’d like to have a standalone Facebook chat clients as well as an email client.

Seriously I have no idea what’s taking Facebook so long to roll out an updated messaging system but the current one is horrendous. My current inbox on Facebook has over 250 messages and there is no hope of recovery. Anyways, aside from my Facebook inbox, having a tool to blog Facebook chat could be useful for many. The only problem is that even though the Greasemonkey script will block chat, your friends will still be notified that you are online.

Receive a message? You simply won’t receive it causing your friends to assume that you have now ignored them and no longer want to speak to them ever again. This is the risk you take when you play with greasey monkeys. Still though, for those that have 5,000 friends (or close to it), signing on to Facebook can be a detriment to your health with an instant influx of 30 plus messages taking up your entire screen. For those few that have friend overload, I’m sure that this tool will come in handy.

Update
As a number of people pointed out in the comments, apparently there is a way to simply go offline. All you have to do is go to the right hand side of the Chat bar and click “Go Offline.” Figuring out how to use chat would definitely be a good idea, prior to building applications around it

A little over a month ago I announced the launch of the Animoto Facebook application. At the time I suggested that this application could easily become a competitor to Slide’s primary application that became popularized via millions of MySpace profiles. Well it looks as though my prediction has come true. Animoto is now the 16th largest application based on daily active users and the application continues to grow.

While Slide has over 10 times the number of active users that Animoto currently has on Facebook, Animoto has destroyed Slide when it comes to their own game: slide shows. A quick look at Slide’s Slide Shows application shows a measly 3,000 active daily users and horrible reviews. Does this mean the end of Slide? Definitely not but it definitely means the beginning of a new leader in the dynamic slideshow space.

Animoto differentiates itself from others (dynamic flash based slideshows) by actually creating a rendered video of your photos intermixed with audio. You can choose to upload your own audio content or you can select from their library. This application is a perfect example of an application that succeeded even with a late entry to the platform. If you spend time developing valuable applications that help users express themselves more effectively, you will surely have a popular application on your hands. If you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Animoto, go install the Animoto Facebook application.

As a sample of what can be produced I have included a video of a Social Times party I threw at the end of last year.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with David Recordon of Six Apart. He has been working on a Facebook application for the past few months that is pretty interesting and extremely simple. The application enables bloggers quickly post their blog posts from within Facebook and send notifications of that post to Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. I’ve been wondering for a long time why nobody had created an effective blogging software for Facebook.

While there is currently no WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, it creates a simple interface for posting to your Typepad, Wordpres, Blogger or Movable Type blog. As David Recordon told me on the phone earlier today, the goal is to “bridge the gap between social networking and blogging.” The application makes it easier for bloggers to pull in their content from their own sites.

The application is extremely simple but David expressed the desire to add on features if the users express a need for more. You can find more by reading about it on his post on his blog. Six Apart decided not to add any viral components to this application because they wanted to focus on utility. While this will most likely have a negative impact on the growth of the application it will most definitely have a positive impact on the user’s experience.

If you want to blog within Facebook go check out the Blog It application.

The causes application has been up for almost a year now but many critics have complained about the lack of money earned for each cause even though millions of users have become supporters. “Support the Campaign for Cancer Research” has attracted over 3 million users and $61,440 has been donated. This amounts to approximately $0.02 per user. Dank Apps attempted to find a solution to this problem and came up with a set of ad supported social change applications.

Users earn money by generating karma points through inviting friends, sending gifts and participating in the community. As you earn more karma points, the donation goes up. Since launching yesterday, the Earn for Breast Cancer application has generated almost $63 wial ith only 212 users. If enough users join this application, it actually has a chance at generating substantial money for charities.

There have been other attempts at this on Facebook but so far they have failed. One of the breast cancer awareness applications required that you download a toolbar to earn money. The only problem with that is nobody wants a toolbar on their computer. As such Dank Apps thinks they have a solution. If the 3 million members that added the Campaign for Breast Cancer Research on causes, the application would generate $60,000 just for the users adding the app. After interacting with the application, significantly more could be generated.

If you want to help bring change but don’t want to make a donation, go install the Earn for Breast Cancer application, Earn for Aids application or the Stop Climate Change application.

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