allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

I love my pet, and for all I know she loves me. I also love telling people about my pet, I carry pictures of her in my Zune and have a pigture of her in her pigloo on my desk. My pet happens to have been rescued from an abusive family and is a guinea pig.

I was trolling the world of Facebook applications when I discovered that I could make a little page for her in my Facebook page.

The process to create her page was simple enough, upload a photo, answer some simple questions and bam, my piglet has her own web page.

I was amazed to see once I selected ‘rodent’ as my pet type that guinea pig was a selection as type of rodent. I was also impressed to see that different breeds of guinea pigs were listed.

Anyone who is passionate about their pets, or wants to create a few ‘pet pages’ for about their friends should take a look at the ‘Pet Profile‘ application. It takes only a few minutes to show the world how great your piglet… er, pet can be!

I remember the days; packets of cheap soup, saving money for beer not food, wearing the same hoodie for a week straight and trying to hit on girls you really had no chance with. Well if any of you out there had a college experience like mine, you just had a flood of memories.

I also remember people complaining about spending money on books, I was a Public Relations major so I never really bought that many books, until the internet came around. Once the internet hit you could easily find books cheaper than those price gouging money mongers at the campus book store were selling them for.

I recently came across The Textbook Price Comparison a nifty little app that compares text book prices. To be honest there are a few different text book comparisons tools out there, and I didn’t notice a price difference between them.

I think this could be a nifty tool to set up for students and friends who go to the same school to compare prices of textbooks. Other textbook Facebook applications offer an exchange style tool, but I never found those services too helpful.

At worst some of your friends can make up a few jokes when they see that you have looked up the pricing for your required reading in “Depressing Women’s Lit of the 19th Century.”

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

Matthew Buckland broke the first screen shot of Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales’ new venture into the social networking arena, Wikia Search. The screenshot, a user profile page, was taken at a conference of about 100 in South Africa. Wikia Search is being developed under Wales’ umbrella for-profit company, Wikia. According to Buckland:

“Wikia is a separate organisation to Wikipedia and aims to take the wiki concept to every other kind of work, book, or community projects that people might build. It also aims to extend the Wikipedia model beyond just nonprofit, educational and research communities.”

One thing is certain: the screenshot indicates an eerie similarity to Facebook’s user interface. At this time, there are too few details to determine whether or not this product will go to market as a Google competitor or as a Facebook competitor. There has been some buzz surrounding the product over the past year, and the great potential in social search has always been predicted, but we will have to wait to see what direction Wales decides to steer Wikia Search into.

Zachary Allia of Northeastern University wins the award for having the most viral application idea. Northeastern University is also the home of another popular (now deceased and reincarnated) application of the past, Napster. The number of application subscribers has doubled from 60,000 users to over 131,000 users in just over a day. So how does it work? Someone will send you a gift, and then you will receive an email notifying you of that gift. A gift is an icon similar to all the other gifts currently offered on Facebook. In order to receive the gift you must add the application to your profile … pretty smart! I am willing to bet that by tomorrow there will easily be over 250,000 users that have added this application. Want to help spread the word and contribute to a Facebook epidemic? Then go add the Free Gift application now.

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