allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Over the past few days I have been seeing an increasing number of holiday applications show up on Facebook. Given that this is the holiday season I thought it would be worthwhile to post a couple of the holiday applications available to users. One of the best ones I’ve seen so far is the Hanukkah Lights application. As you would imagine, the Hanukkah Lights application provides you with a menorah for your Facebook profile. On each night of Hanukkah, your menorah will automatically be lit at around sundown. If you celebrate Hanukkah, check out the Hanukkah Lights application.

The other holiday application is the Be Santa application. Created by the same people that developed the Lotto application. Be Santa enables you to create your own wish list of presents by writing “letters to santa” as well as give gifts to your friends. Those gifts are then given to your friends on Christmas day. An additional bonus to this application is a giveaway on Christmas day. $2500 of the gifts that have been given by users will be purchased and delivered to the recipients. If you want to Be Santa this Christmas, go grab the Be Santa application.

I wasn’t able to find any Kwanza applications but there were a few Ramadan applications but usage appeared sparse. Given the large base of Muslims on Facebook I see this as an opportunity for application developers. Additionally there is a large Turkish and Muslim base on Facebook that would be a great target for this type of application. Unfortunately I don’t enough about the holiday and don’t have the time to develop an application. If you want to create a popular application, I would suggest trying to develop the Ramadan celebration application.

Are there any holidays that I’m missing? Have you seen any other interesting holiday applications?

Browsing through the directory this morning I stumbled upon the new Virtual MTV application. Give that MTV is so hip, I just had to try it out I added the application and after being asked to invite my friends I was redirected to my profile. I was pretty frustrated because this is how they described the application: “A FREE ONLINE virtual world where you can live the MTV Life.” God only knows that I want to live the MTV life! Where is my virtual world? Typically I disable profile boxes when I install applicaitions so nothing displayed on my profile either and there is no sidebar link for the application.

I uninstalled the application and tried it again this time around though I let them install something in my profile box. All that showed up was the widget that you see embedded in this article. I click on the widget in my profile and head over to the “videos” tab. I highly recommend checking out the first video because it’s pretty hillarious (at least I thought it was). If you click it you’ll here the following:

Hey this is the guys from cobra starship and we’re hanging out here at MTV’s virtual world. We all just got sweet new outfits and we’re hanging out at our private after party so come on and hang out with us.

Now, I don’t watch MTV anymore but was it always this bad? Who says something like that? I guess what was difficult about this application is that I didn’t understand the context of the application. I’ve never watched the show “Cobra Starship” nor have I partied in the MTV virtual world. I definitely wanted to though when I saw the application! I think MTV should have embedded their virtual world within this application so that when you added the app, you were automatically “beamed into” the virtual world. Maybe I thought about this too much.

Either way, I’m not a big fan of this widget app. If you are into Virtual MTV (whatever that is), go check out the Virtual MTV application.

One of my readers just sent me a pretty funny video from College Humor. It’s a video about FNN, the Facebook New Network, that is covering your personal news feed live.

Just last week there was a ton of buzz surrounding Microsoft’s investment in Facebook that placed a $15 billion valuation on the social networking website. While many in the industry were trying to figure out whether or not this investment was justifiable (myself included), a few developers decided to team up and put a twist on the valuation. Rather than figuring out how much money Mark Zuckerberg was now worth, these developers created an application that calculates the value of your personal profile.

Among applications developers and investors there has been a lot of discussion as to how much an active application user is worth. While there is still significant debate about the issue, there is no question that a Facebook user has some sort of value and Facebook’s Social Ads system will start to monetize each of those users. So how much are you worth to Facebook? Tod Earwood, Rob May, Eric Dadoun, Denis Bratchuk and Alexey Komissarouk have come up with a quirky way of calculating.

The application factors in the number of: friends, photos uploaded, photos tagged in, wall posts on your wall, number of groups owned, number of notes written. While the application wasn’t accurate with the number of groups I own and the number of notes I’ve written, it was right about everything else. All of these numbers factored together resulted in a $338 valuation of my profile. I was pretty impressed with my profile value until I looked at my friends’ values. Among my friends that have added the application I rank 7 out of 8. My most valuable friend has a profile value in excess of $2,000 and the most valuable profile held by Julia Dunlop is worth a whopping $3,338. Not bad!

While these profiles are worth a significant amount, I wouldn’t dive into the profile trading business right now given the subjectivity of this value. If you want to see how much your profile is worth go check out the How Much Am I Worth application.

Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook without a little bit of childish behavior. That’s why the guys over at Hungry Machine thought it would be a good idea to launch the Halloween Candy application. The application is as useful as food fight, zombies and all the other Facebook applications that we love to hate but hey, it’s HHalloween and we all need some way to celebrate. Don’t let your celebrations end with this application though!

I’ll be headed out this evening but I haven’t come up with a costume. Would being my Facebook profile be too cliché? I think I’m going to skip getting dressed up. Any of you going out trick or treating tonight? Let us know! This application is a great way to say happy Halloween to all your friends today (well at least 20 of them due to Facebook’s invite restriction). If you want to throw candy at your friends to wish them a happy Halloween, go grab the Halloween Candy application now!

Given that I spend countless hours on Facebook, I’d imagine that calling me a “Facebook Addict” wouldn’t be too far off. I mean it is pretty much my job at this point. According to the FB Addict application though, I am not hooked on Facebook. My qualification for a Facebook addict? If you add this application to check, you probably are a Facebook addict. The factors used by this application to determine whether or not you are an addict are: entering your gender, being part of a network, recency of profile editing, filling all of your profile, having a popular wall and posting lots of notes.

Entering your gender accounts for one sixth of your Facebook addiction? I have to disagree with their model. I would base your addiction on time spent on Facebook, number of status updates, number of messages sent and number of applications installed. All of these things can’t be tracked by applications though so they had to use another model. While this may not be the most accurate model for measuring your addiction, close to 15,000 people used this application yesterday and over 150,000 users have add the application in total.

If you want to check if you are an Facebook addict based on the FB Addict model, go install the FB Addict application. If you disagree with their model, what do you think are the tell tale signs of Facebook addiction?

Remeber the classic board game, “Risk?” I used to be a huge fan. Eric Schiermeyer and Mark Pincus have developed a seriously addictive multiplayer version of the game called “Attack!” Similar to online poker, there is a game staging area where you can pick what game you would like to join as well as view which of your friends are currently playing in a game.

The first time I played this game I lost pretty bad. Apparently there are some other people on Facebook that are experts at this game. While I thought I may be one of them, I definitely am not. Apparently the key to this game is to join a game and then invite 20 of your friends. As soon as you send the invites you will receive 20 armies and can rampage through the other territories.

The only thing lacking from this game is the ability to private message people. Once they add that, this game is going to remain as one of the more entertaining games on Facebook. I already lost once and now I want to go play again! If you are a big fan of Risk, go check out the Attack application.

While sitting at lunch with a fellow Search Marketing Expo attendee, the topic of mothers on Facebook was brought up. Nataliya, the person who I was chatting with, brought up an excellent point: what if your mom posted your baby photos on Facebook? Currently, with the lack of a grouping feature, all of those photos will show up in my friends’ news feeds.

So if you decide to add your mother as a friend on Facebook, you better be nice to her because otherwise photos that you don’t want other people to see (like the one above), may end up in your friends’ newsfeeds. Have you added your mother as a friend on Facebook?

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com has been giving a great presentation at the Graphing Social Patterns event. I will be posting a more detailed summary of the days events later this evening. For now, I thought I would share a funny photo that Danny created. You can view an enlarged version here.

Are you addicted to Facebook? I know I am. It starts of with a simple exploration of your friends on the site and suddently you are logging on 10 times a day to see if any of your friends have made updates to their profile, changed their relationship status or have posted new videos or articles. Suddnely you are glued to your computer monitor and the only thing on the screen is Facebook. So maybe your addiction isn’t that bad but apparently enough people are addicted that wikiHow has published an article entitled “How to Quite Facebook.” WikiHow suggests a 6-step solution:

1. Admit you have a problem - This sounds like the first step to any other addiction. WikiHow suggests that you ask yourself “What did I just accomplish by checking Facebook?” Ha! If only I had that much self-control over my Facebook addiction. Well, at least I admit to it!
2. Define your goals on Facebook - Hmm … I never really had any goals with Facebook. Although maybe my goal should be to reach 5,000 friends. That surely would get me to login more frequently. WikiHow suggests just logging in to check on friends’ birthdays, keep track of old friends, etc. Once you catch yourself going off track, log off. If only it was that easy!
3. Make a Facebook Schedule - Seriously? If you find yourself scheduling Facebook into your daily schedule, this should be a serious warning sign. WikiHow suggests that “after each Facebook goal, write down how much time and at what frequency you’ll need to be on Facebook to achieve that goal.” Are they serious? Based on the calculations they suggested, you end up using Facebook for 6 hours and 20 minutes a week. I think this is still a relatively significant amount of time, although I spend much more time on the site.
4. Think of other things you could be doing - Duh! This is a no brainer. I could be at the gym, socializing in the real world or a million other things but there is a reason I logged on in the first place. I’m starting to think that these suggestions are totally useless!
5. Leave Facebook - This should have been number one! If you are spending way too much time on Facebook, quit cold turkey. It’s like having your cell phone turned off for 24 hours. Once you do it, you will realize how dependent you have become and think twice about your usage.
6. Find a substitute - This one is good. Facebook taking up too much time? Find another site that isn’t as good! WikiHow says “if you find you’re at a computer during critical relapse time, find another website to log onto and read instead of Facebook.” Facebook relapse? This is a little crazy.

So how much time do you spend on Facebook? Has Facebook become an addiction for you?

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