Are you a big fan of writing but just can’t find the words to write an entire novel? Worry no more as you can now rely on the support of your friends and other members of Facebook to get the job done. The Just Three Words application is a simple concept that has powerful results. Users can either create a story from scratch or join another story. Each story has its own unique topic that has interesting twists and turns since each writer is limited to only three words per post.

There were some extremely well written pieces scattered throughout this application. With close to 5,000 daily users, it is not a surprise that this application has produced such impressive results. As I browsed through the various pieces created by the users of this application, the most common theme was a sexual one. Each piece sounded like a cheesy romance novel that you would find on the shelves of your local supermarket.

One story that I decided to participate in was about Facebook application and was created by my friend Dan Peguine. So far, the story has not become very elaborate. “Facebook apps are an enigma; some are ridiculously stupid and others mind-blowing. For example, the idea of writing an app where people make themselves heard through various voice recordings is absurd, yet also, well, sort of titillating.” I added the words “voice recordings is.” I think I am indeed a novelist at heart!

If you want to join the story with others, go check out the Just Three Words application.

A site called Facebook Business Solutions is a pretty funny example of some false Facebook advertising services for businesses. I have included the pictures of the services below but I thought I would highly some of the best ones. Facebook Surf enables brands to track their customers every move across the web. Not only will they know which sites they have visited but they will also know how much time was spent at each one.

“Facebook Recycle” is another funny one. It displays all of a user’s trashed files from their personal computer into their newsfeed. One of the funniest quotes from the recycle application description is, “The last thing Facebook wants to be for the user is intrusive. We have designed the Facebook Recycle Application to be very clean and neat, and to sit nicely on any user’s Profile Page. It runs quietly in the background, collecting data from the user’s personal computer, and requires a minimal amount of RAM.” This one is definitely less intrusive than Facebook Beacon

“Facebook Receipt” keeps physical copies of each of your physical receipts from purchases in stores. This is valuable data for advertisers! “Facebook Locate” enables brands to track their customer’s every move. And for that worst case scenario, “If the user heads in the opposite direction of your store, don’t give up! Facebook Locate will then begin to text various sales deals and promotions that you provide us.” Yes, Facebook Locate will bombard the consumer with advertisements enticing them to change direction and return to your store.

If you aren’t making purchases in my brand’s store all day long then you aren’t spending as much as you could! Check out the screenshots below. One thing that I should note is that this site is not affiliated with Facebook. They have literally duplicated the design of Facebook and as such I would assume that they will soon receive cease and desist letters in the coming days.

Facebook Surf

Facebook Image Scan

Facebook Recycle

Facebook Diary

Yesterday one of my friends invited me to race them on Facebook. It was an entertaining invite request because the car that she wanted to race me in was a 2002 Saab 93. Today I decided to accept her request and check out the application. I was actually glad that I ended up installing the application because it is an entertaining one. When you add the application you are prompted to select a vehicle from a list of lower quality cars including a 1993 Ford Festiva, Renault Twingo, an ATV, 2003 Ford Ranger and a few others.

As many of my friends did, I chose the 2002 Saab 93 because it had the best picture. The lesson learned was never to judge a car by its picture. I ended up winning a measly 3 out of 10 races. Definitely a poor performance! The goal is straight forward. Race your friends and other Facebook members. You receive points for each race that you win and those points can be used to upgrade to new cars. Apparently you need to get 10,000 points to upgrade to the next level which is the equivalent of winning 50 races. At this pace it’s going to take me over a week to upgrade.

This application is a clever twist on the classic “kick apps” like Zombies, Vampires, Food Fight and other classic Facebook applications. I definitely recommend checking it out and racing your friends. It’s a great way to waste a few minutes of your day! If you want to race your friends, go grab the PetrolHead application.

My Car Page

Friends Car Page

Showroom Page

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.