allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Yesterday I suggested that Facebook is for fun and the odds of people using the site for productivity purposes are slim to none. While I still think that’s the case, Divshare has launched a pretty sweet project management application. The AllFacebook writer, Rory Marinich set up a sample project for me and it seems fairly similar to Basecamp sans the design. You can upload any type of file to your project and the application automatically detects the format.

For each project there is also a wall where you can post notes. The only thing that appears to be missing is any sort of scheduling feature (deadlines, etc). It would be nice to know what the deadlines are for a project. This application definitely accopmlishes what is required for smaller projects. Given that students are the largest U.S. demographic on Facebook, this would be an awesome tool for school projects.

While I’m skeptical about the future success of this application, it is well designed and has a good shot at getting at least a few users. DivShare previously launched the DivShare Facebook application and it had relatively poor results. The application currently only has 38 daily users. If you are looking for a project management tool on Facebook though, you should check out the DivShare Projects application.

Free web hosting providers have been around for at least a decade. Most of those providers covered costs via advertising revenue. Om Malik has posted about Joyent’s new offering to Facebook developers. Soon, Joyent will provide free mid-tier hosting solutions for all Facebook application developers. This makes a lot of sense for Joyent given that they have scalable solutions that can host even the most robust Facebook applications.

A few days ago, another hosting provider emailed me about a similar solution. They launched the Free Unmetered Hosting application which is essentially a promotion for the hosting site FreeUnmeteredHost.com. As far as I know, this company doesn’t provide the same type of scalable, redundant hosting sollutions that Joyent provides.

The majority of Facebook applications will never need to upgrade to the premium hosting solutions given that there are few applications that have a large number of users. As I told Om Malik yesterday, there are only 4 applications on Facebook that have over 1 million daily users and 91 applications that have over 1 million total installs. Approximately 15 percent of all applications have at least 10,000 installs. As the platform expands you can expect these numbers to decrease.

So for all of you that plan on launching your own applications in the coming months, Joyent appears to be the best option. Free hosting and future scalability if by chance your application hits a home run and gets hundreds of thousands of users.

Over the past few weeks I have been on a conference binge. I attended the Community Next and Graphing Social Patterns conferences out in the San Jose area, Danny Sullivan’s Search Marketing Expo in New York, Snap Summit in San Francisco and yesterday’s New New Internet conference in Reston, Virginia. It has been an exhausting few weeks but one thing I’ve gotten used to is sleeping on people’s couches. Rather than blowing all my cash on hotels, I’ve simply asked people to crash on their couch for a night or two. If you are looking to travel on a budget, sleeping on couches may just be the best option.

In the past couple days, IdeaCloud (an application development shop) launched the CouchSurf application. CouchSurf is the Facebook version of CouchSurfing.com. If you want a quick way to meet interesting people while traveling, couch surfing is definitely one way to go. While I’m not quite sure that I would personally want to sleep on someone’s couch that I don’t know, it is always a free alternative to hostels and you also have the comfort of a fully furnished apartment or house.

There are some die hard couch surfers out there. While I haven’t had the fortune to meet any of these individuals I’m sure that they are a great group of people. The CouchSurf application has failed to gain any significant traction so far but given the large market of couch surfers, there is some potential for this to grow. Conversely, the Couch Surfing Facebook group doesn’t have many users and doesn’t appear to be a highly active group. If you want to try out couch surfing on Facebook, grab the CouchSurf application.

A couple years back one of my friends suggested that someone make a social network for families. After listening to their concept I agreed and began outlining a site which ultimately never saw the lite of day. It appears that others were more determined. FamilyLink.com is one of the sites that decided to tackle the problem of there not being a single place for families to connect.

While their website never gained traction, the creators of FamilyLink.com decided to launch a Facebook application. It was a great decision. Their application has now attracted over half a million users and has over 55,000 daily users. The “We’re Related” application enables you to list each of your family members that are on Facebook and how you are related to them. If your relative is not on Facebook, you can manually enter them as well. The cool part about having access to your family members that are on Facebook is the dynamically generated family photo album. The photo album mimics the iPhone’s album cover flow allowing you to smoothly flip through each of the images.

While this is a great first start to the application, there are many features that are lacking. I would recommend some sort of message board as well as a family cookbook to be added to this application. I’m sure there are a number of additional features that would be good but I can’t seem to come up with any others this moment. This application is a great first start and if the application owners decide to build this out they will surely have a sizable returning user base. If you want to keep track of your family on Facebook, go check out the We’re Related application.

Just when you thought you had seen all the friend visualizations that there are to see, another comes along and puts just a slight twist on things. King’s Collage provides you with five different collage variations: the traditional friend collage (similar to the friends grid and my entourage applications), a sun, a start, a heart and an arrow. Not very creative shapes but definitely different. Since the application launched just a couple of days ago, it has added almost 10,000 users. Not bad for an application that doesn’t provide an extremely unique offering.

Honestly, Facebook needs to come up with a way for grouping similar applications together. Rather than having users browse through countless duplicate applications, it would be much more useful to view a list of completely unique applications. There are now over 6,600 applications on Facebook and there is no way that most people are going to browse through all of them. Enough of my bickering!

The King’s Collage application provides a slight twist to an already successful Facebook application model. It has gone viral by forcing users to invite their friends if they wish to use other visualizations aside from the classic one. While I refrained from spamming my friends in order to unlock other visualizations, hundreds of other people have chosen to participate in the fun. If you want to spam your friends in order to get semi-unique looking visualizations, go grab the King’s Collage application.

Your out having a good time one night with your friends … a really good time. You wake up the next morning and have some emails in your inbox and a few missed calls. Apparently one of your friends just tagged you in some photos and you look like crap! First message: “Hey Nick, just wanted to say that I saw your pictures from last night. Looks like you had fun! Call me later.” Second message: “Nick, dude … you seriously had way too much fun last night. Have you seen the pictures on Facebook?”

Not that I’ve experienced this or anything but for those that have, I’m sure it can be pretty bad. The first step is to not act like a fool in front of your friends who all have digital cameras. If you are in college and end up acting like an idiot one night though it would be nice if there was some way to know that you have been tagged in photos and they are about to be published to your friends’ newsfeeds.

Worry no more thanks to the Photo Tag Alert application. As soon as this application spots a new photo that you’ve been tagged in, you will immediately receive a text message to your phone. You can then logon and untag yourself from any of the compromising photos that you may not want all your Facebook friends to see. While Facebook already sends you email alerts, not everybody gets email on their phone. For those unfortunate few, you can now use the Photo Tag Alert application. Enjoy!

This morning a new Google News application was receiving a lot of hype. Most people were singing praises about the new application. I’m not quite sure why. If you want an example of an application that doesn’t provide users with any added value, the Google News application definitely meets the criteria. There is nothing unique about this application except for the fact that it is made by Google.

If you visit Google News, you can do all of the same things except for sharing the articles on Facebook. Looking to invite your friends to use this application? You can’t. Rather than receiving email alerts, your Facebook profile gets updated. Great! Now other users can view news that I had been searching for. This would be great if I visited my own profile on a regular basis, but alas, I do not.

So what benefit does the Google News application provide? It lets you share news articles more easily. Honestly, that’s really not that great of a feature. My guess is that the popularity of this application is going to fall drastically as soon as the buzz dies down. Google News is calling this an “experimental application.” I don’t think there was much effort put into this experiment. If you have any desire to let your friends view news alerts from the comfort of your own profile, go grab the Google News application.

I am a huge fan of using wikis for organizing content within an organization. Thanks to Wetpaint, you can now leverage the power of wikis directly on Facebook. The Wiki Whiteboard application enables you to create new wikis or join existing ones. Once you create your wiki, you can invite any of your Facebook friends to come and participate.

In comparison to MediaWiki which is frequently criticized for forcing users to learn a new language to modify wiki pages, the Wiki Whiteboard application provides a simple WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editor to make editing a simple task. Additionally, you can create additional pages within your wiki in order to organize content. Facebook’s restrictions on application canvas page width significantly reduced the usefulness of this application. The effective width of each wiki page is around 400 pixels, less than the width of this blog entry.

I can see this application being integrated into groups once Facebook launches the groups API. If the majority of your event and group organization takes place within Facebook, this application may be for you. If you want to try out creating your own wiki, go grab the Wiki Whiteboard application.

Last night I found a pretty cool application on Facebook. The Friends Density application enables you to view a visual representation of where your friends are on a map of the United States. It is a really basic application but if your map is anything similar to mine, it is really telling. Based on the map above, can you tell where I live?

While this application does not leverage the social graph heavily (you can’t see your friends’ graphs) it is definitely a cool app. This reminds me of the visualization provided by the Friend Wheel application. I wonder how many other ways there are to visualize your relationships.

If you are based in the U.S. and want to see where your friends are on the map, go grab the Friends Density application.

As useful as importing your Orkut profile into Facebook, the MyOrkut application enables you to do the same thing but for Orkut. Developed in India by Jeetu Mirchandani, this application does exactly what it claims to do. It is extremely simple and displays only your profile and your Orkut “scraps.” There are already over 2,700 active daily users and over 10,000 installs.

When Jeetu’s Google AdWords account gets cancelled, I won’t be surprised. He is currently placing ads within this application. I’d imagine that Google wants to be the only one making money from their social networking site. While the application is limited in its feature set, it gets the job done. If you are an avid Orkut user, go grab the MyOrkut application.

Orkut Application Screenshot

Orkut Application Profile View

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