Halloween Haunting

Haunt your friends with this Halloween app. Select any Halloween gifts that you think would scare your friend.  Everytime you login you will be awarded with Freaky Funds which you can later on use to purchase other Halloween treats.

What should you be for Halloween?

If you haven’t decided yet what costume you wil be hearing during Halloween, this app will help you by asking several questions that will determine its final suggestion  for what you should be.

Halloween Countdown

Want to have a Halloween countdown clock on your profile, this is the Facebook app to to use.  It allows you to select background for your Halloween countdown clock as well.

Halloween Pumpkins

This app lets you carve a pumpkin and put it on your profile or carve another one and send it to your friends.

Halloween Wars

If you like Mafia wars, this app is a simple taken on yet another war game. But this your objective is to terrorize Halloween night.

Halloween Eating Contest

Challenge your friends into a virtual eating contest featuring some yummy halloween-inspired treats.

Halloween Hatchlings

Kill the new breed of monster hatchlings before the evil Count starts creating a new of monsters and release them to the world.

Halloween Quotes

Pepper your Facebook profile with cool Halloween quotes complete with nice looking background. The app lets you display a single or random quotes.

Halloween Treats

This app lets you send Halloween Treats to your Facebook friends.  You can select various treats such as scary, spooky or funny pictures and animated GIFs. You will be able to unlock more treats eavery day.

Halloween Name Generator

Still don’t know what name to call your self, use this app to get your Halloween Name. Just type in your name, select your sex and select a background to use in your Facebook profile.

Which sexy Halloween costume is right for me?

So you want to join the Halloween fun but could not decide what costume to use that will make you still look sexy? Take the quiz and find the perfect sexy costume that will suit you.

Call Me with Google Voice

This app lets you display your Google Voice widget in tab, profile and box. It allows you to make phone blasts to your Facebook News feed, create widget link that you can append to events and customize flash load image.

Call-My-W&ll

This is a simple with one simple and yet useful purpose – it lets you call in your Facebook status updates and then leave a voice status.

Reach Me On My Mobile

A pretty useful Facebook app that allows your friend to contact you through call, chat, text and voice messaging from your Facebook profile. It also prompts you to get online and log-in to your Facebook account for new file sent by your friends.

Telephone

Talk and send instant messages to your Facebook friends for free. You can also leave a voice message to your friends.

Party Line

This is an easy-to-use and useful app that lets you make instant conference call with your Facebook friends.
Jottby Jott, Inc.

Jott

A voice-to-text service app that allows you to capture thoughts, send emails and text messages as well as connect to popular web services through a simple phone call.

GuerrillaTel – Call for FREE

If you’re in the US or Canada, this app lets you make free phone-to-phone calls via your Facebook profile. You simply click on a friend’s picture to connect via phone patch for free.

Talkster Phone Party

This app lets you call a friend or a group of up to 5 friends at once for free. It allows you to use any mobile or landline phone, internationally.

Calliflower- FREE Conference Calls

Another app that lets you start a conference call for free. It allows you to call from home, mobile, Skype or any VOIP service.

Calls & SMS worldwide

Lets you make calls as well as send SMS from your Facebook account directly to your friends. It also lets you friens call you or leave a voicemail to you directly from your Facebook profile.

Share through SpinVox

This app lets you update your Facebook status as well as you Twitter and Jaiku accounts through a simple phone call. It also sends your messages into SMS.

Have you used any of these applications in your Facebook account?  Share with us your experiences by leaving a comment below.

Guess what I told him? I said he doesn’t need a personal blog. He can do all those things just by creating a Facebook account.

To be honest, it was a spur of the moment reaction. After teaching my friend how to create a Facebook account, it finally dawned on me – Facebook indeed has become a personal blogging platform. And I could think of 5 major reasons why Facebook is the new personal blogging platform.

1. Chronologically Arranged Blog Posts – You can create pseudo blog posts using Facebook’s status updates right? It doesn’t limit your updates to a certain number of characters like Twitter. And Facebook even automatically parse long updates and gives you a “read more” feature.

2. Photo Attachment to Status Updates – Facebook status updates also lets you attach related photos to accompany the texts  content of your updates. Or you can even post just photos with a caption which can also be considered as a regular blog posts (aka status updates)

3. Restricted Readership to your Facebook Friends – Since we’re talking about personal blog here, most likely we want to have a restrictive readership. Facebook of course has that facility.  As all your updates are accessible only by your Facebook contact.

4. Comment/Like Features – If you’re going to use Wordpress you’d probably need to find a post-rating plugin to enable your readers to rate your blog posts. If you use Facebook, it’s an embedded feature called – “Like”. As for comments, I don’t have to tell you that Facebook has a great commenting feature. Even better is the fact that Facebook comments are spam-free. Not unlike the usual blogging platform.

5. How About Categories? – Like I Said, my friend wanted a personal blog, so Categories is not really relevant when you are running a personal blog, right? And besides Blogspot.com didn’t have the category feature at first, right? Do you agree? Or you have any other idea on how to have this feature on your Facebook personal blog?

There you go, five major reasons why you can use Facebook if you want to start a personal blog with restricted readership. Did we miss anything?  If you have something to add to the reasons why Facebook is becoming a personal blogging platform, feel free to leave a comment.

And don’t forget to get your personal name as your Facebook account name, in case it is still available.

1. Stop answering those trivia quizzes – Ok folks, I know it’s fun to do. But doing it in moderation may not be bad all. I’m talking about the slew of  all sorts of Trivia that you can play while you are in Facebook. There’s all sorts of things here really. Be it music, movies, 70’s music, 70’s movies, all-time favorite movies, among other Facebook Trivia Quizzes. And why do you need to stop playing these trivia quizzes? I don’t know, ask yourself are you trying to convey a message that says how laid-back you are that you can afford to stay log-in in Facebook anytime, anywhere answering these quizzes. Does answering these quizzes fulfill the function of a social network? – that is to socialize?

2. Stop Playing Mafia Wars and Farm Ville, etc. – Similar to Trivia Quizzes, updates and notes keeps on arriving on my email regarding a friends latest conquest in Mafia Wars, or when an animal appears on a friend’s farm.  I don’t care whether you’ve moved to the 200th level in Mafia Wars or whether you have grown this and that in your Farm.

3. You Dont’ Need to Tell the World Who Your Friends Are – We can see them by clicking on the Friends Tab on your Profile. We don’t need to know either what type of friends they are. I’m referring of course to this app which lets you show your friends in a widget-like box.

4. Avoid the one-liner status updates - “home now”, “have a good weekend everyone’, “craving for sweets”. You get the drift?

5.  Get the Hang of Using Facebook Chat – And avoid using the comments in the status updates.  Don’t you find it annoying when people talk using the commenting feature of Status updates? Especially when the one who post the status updates replies to a comment of his friends? That’s what the Facebook chat facility is for.

There you have it, 5 things that you may avoid doing to improve your social presence or profile via Facebook.  You may agree or disagree with me by leaving a comment below. But if you do disagree, please be nice. :-)

Photoeffects

As it name’s suggest, this Facebook photo app lets you apply various effects to your Facebook photos and then share it with your friends and family. Choose from around 81 photo effects that you want to add to your photos using an easy-to-use interface.

Photo Tag

This Facebook app lets you add custom speech bubbles and other items to your photos. It allows you to use as many photos as you want. What’s good about this app is the fact that it automatically tags your friends when you’ve taken their photo and decided to share it with other people on Facebook.

Blast Your Photo

This is a pretty straightforward photo app that lets you do one thing with your photo – add an effect that will make you appear as if you’re gargling with Listerine. It’s a simple app and yet could be fond, especially if you’ll apply it to the photos of your friends.

Your Baby Photo

Again another simple Facebook photo app that lets you do one thing, “babify” your own photo to make it appears as if it was taken when you were actually a baby.  Another fun and cool Facebook app worth trying, if only for some laugh that you’re going to give once you see how the app will turn your old photo into your baby photo.

Lunapic

This app is a cool way of editing your Facebook photos using a single click. Choose from various effects such as cut, crop, rotate, sharpen, blend and other cool animation effects. Even more fun is the fact that you can edit your friends’ photos as well.

Phixr Photo Editor

Phixr lets you edit your photos from simple cropping to resizing, removing red eye, adding speech bubbles, removing photo noise as well as other effects and tools. It’s actually a web browser plug-in which is ported to Facebook.

BW Photo

Although this Facebook photo app’s main purpose is to turn your photos into black and white it also allows to add other  fun effects such as Sepia, Shadow, Saturate and more.

FotoFlexer

Now here’s a powerful photo editing toos for your Facebook photos. And perhaps one of the most used as well by Facebook members. It lets you create fun greeting cards, enlarge, crop, rotate, cartoonify, distory, and many other things that you can possibly do with your photos and with your friends’ photos as well.

Funny Photo Widget

Just by the example funny photo above, i’ll let you decide whether you’ll find this Facebook photo app funny or not. Alright, of course it’s a funny and cool photo editing tools. You can use the edited photo as your Facebook profile pic and what’s so good about it is the fact that the effects randomly changes.

PhotoMagic

This Facebook photo app provides cool configurable image processing effects that you can apply to your photos. It’s easy to use as well. All you need to do is to select a photo from your Facebook photo albums, select the effects you want added and automatically upload it to your album. The effects include blur, sharpen, threshhold, sepia, pencial sketch, paint draw, speckle.  Yeah, it kind of reminds you of the various Photoshop effects, right. The app is pretty cool, try it.

• send postcards from the Pope to your friends
• download and read the Pope’s Message for the 43th World Communications Day
• spread friendship with the Pope and become a witness of Christ in the world through the web

It’s a good thing that whoever is in-charge of the Pope’s online publicity program decided to create a Facebook app rather than a Facebook profile for the Pope. At least, Facebook users would not expect to really communicate with the Pope since Pop2You is just an application rather than a Facebook profile.

If you need more social media applications relating to Pope Benedict XVI and his activities you may also want to check out the Pope’s YouTube Channel, as well as an iPhone app which was just released recently.

I wonder when will the Pope have his Twitter account?

To use this feature, click on the Chat icon at the bottom right corner of your Facebook home page. You’d be asked which of your Friend List you’d like to be displayed in the chat pane. That is of course, if you have already created a Friend List before.

You can also create new a New Friend list from the Chat Pane.  Simply enter a name for that Friend List and drag friends you want to be included on the list.

If you want certain group of Facebook contacts not to appear on your Chat Pane, simply uncheck that list. And to view your Facebook contacts alphabetically, just simply uncheck all the Friend Lists.

Now, here’s an interesting feature (which some of you may not like). In the Chat Pane, you’d notice green switches opposite the Friend List name. Clicking on that green switch will turn off that Friend List. Meaning, your friends in that list will see your status as offline, even though you will appear online in your other Friend List.

So, if you don’t want your co-workers know that you are in Facebook at certain time of the day, say during office hours but you still want to connect with your other friends, then this feature will be very useful.

Another feature which was “re-activated” is the facility to view your Facebook friends’ status updates. You can view this list from your Facebook Home Page by clicking on the “status updates’ tab at the left side navigation. If you don’t see the link yet, just click on “More” and simply drag the “status updates’ link on top of the list to make it appear every time you access your Facebook home page.

If you’re asking why these two filters were placed in different location, here’s what the Facebook blog has to say:
We’ve added the filter for status updates to your home page, rather than the Friends Page, because the two play different roles on the site. The home page focuses on showing you what you’re friends are sharing, while giving you options for filtering that content. The Friends Page is the place for organizing and finding friends.

There you go. Hope this would make everybody happier with Facebook now.

For those who can already see the new Friends Page, the first thing you’d notice is of course the search box on the upper right-hand corner of the page. Just enter any information and you’ll find a list of friends connected to your Facebook account. This also goes true for people who connect with you via email on Facebook.

This is a cool and useful feature and yet just the tip of the iceberg.  The most notable feature of the new Friends Page is an easier interface for organizing your Facebook friends into groups. By default, you can only see the “All Friends List”. Below this tab is an option to create a new list. Clicking on this tab will display a box asking you to enter a name for the friend list. After entering the name for your list, you will be brought to a new screen where you can either enter an information to search for a friend that you want to add to the list. Alternatively you can choose to add multiple friends.  All your friends will be displayed and you can just select the friends you want to add to the link. After saving, you can now see the friend list you created at the left-hand side of your Facebook page.

Cool thing about this Friend List is the fact that you can send invites, shoutouts, share links and photos to specific friends only. You can also filter the updates you receive on your Friends Page to a specific group of friends only. This will reduce the noise on your Friends Page and would be most useful if you’ve hot high school buddies who are fond of answering stupid quizzes on Facebook.

• Julius Harper, co-founder of the first and largest Facebook group against the previous change to the terms
• Anne Kathrine Petteroe, co-founder of the first and largest Facebook group against the previous change to the terms
• Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• The Consumerist, which originally reported on our revised terms in February

Or if you’re one of the more than 1.4 million Facebook users who didn’t care about this exercise,  you might want to ignore the results of this voting and continue with your Facebook activities.

But for those who care, you might find it interesting that there were only 600,000 of you who voted. While these maybe a significant number, it still is way below 50% of the total number of Facebook users. 74% of those who voted were in favor of the new documents.

Despite the low turn-out of votes, the proposed documents shall be instituted once the audit is done.

Now maybe it’s about time for us to read the proposed Facebook governance documents to avoid possible legal impediments later on.

So, if you are maintaining a Facebook public profile and you want to activate this feature, just click on the Edit Profile link under your profile picture, edit your mobile settings, enter your phone number, wait for the confirmation code to be sent on your mobile phone, confirm it right away and you can start updating your Facebook public profiles via SMS.

This feature currently works for mobile accounts with certain carriers in the US, Canada, UK, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Maldives are supported at this time.

To bad it is not yet available in my area.  Facebook is definitely losing some good mileage by not activating this feature with our local mobile carrier. This could be a great opportunity especially now that Facebook is gaining popularity here in the country where I am right now.  And with SMS as major form of communication, this would be a good add-on for Facebook.

Next, we have Facebook’s Zuckerberg announcing that Facebook has reached  milestone in terms of membership – 200 million active users.  And to celebrate their achievement, Facebook decided to do some good deeds as well as to document this milestone by way of the fan page Facebook for Good. You can do your part by purchasing some of the featured gifts in the Facebook shop.  Part of the proceeds from the sale of those items will go to some charitable institutions. It’s Facebook’s little own way of paying it forward.

A few days after releasing the Yahoo News App for the iPhone, Yahoo released its native Messenger iPhone app. It’s a full-featured YM iPhone app which I would really like to have on my iPhone. But unfortunately, the app is not available to all iPhone users yet. But if you are located in the US, you might want to check it out.

Gmail also joined the noise this week with two new features from the Gmail Labs – Inserting images and Sender time zone. Like I said in my previous post, I like the Sender time zone feature as it makes Gmail an instant time zone converter.

And finally the biggest news to hit the IT scene this week – Twitter is exponentially growing. Facebook may have reached its 200 millionth users, but look who is hot on the trail? Twitter of course. Twitter’s site traffic has reached the 10 millionth mark in March and continuous to grow everyday.  And with two of the major internet players rumored to be looking at possibly acquiring Twitter, we could only say that Twitter is now the hottest commodity today.

That’s it for this week. Who knows what will happen next week? Stay tune for more coverage here at RotorBlog.

A good proof would be the Facebook user grotth heat map showing how Facebook has expanded worldwide. And with such big userbase it is but logical to think now how Facebook could be put into better use, aside from being a premier online communication channel.

So, to celebrate this milestone and to perhaps show the world that Facebook could be put into better, and really “social” use, Facebook has launched a campaign aptly titled “Facebook for Good“.  If you’re a Facebook user, you may share how Facebook has changed your life for the good or for the good of other people.  It’s a Facebook fan page for sharing how Facebook was able to influence individual to do good. In addition, Facebook has also teamed up with 16 charity/advocacy groups who also want to make the world a better place for all of us. All you need to do is to purchase any of the featured gifts and 90-95% of the proceeds of these gifts will be donated to a charitable organization.

Quite a good effort from Facebook to show its good side, and we could only applaud Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook crew for this advocacy. Although, a little more concrete would have been a better way to show its goodness.

Twitter and Facebook are the two hottest social networking/web 2.0 service right now. And perhaps most of us are using both services for different purposes. While this maybe all well and good, don’t you wish you can integrate both services? Well, here are 10 Twitter-related application available in Facebook.

TweetSync -lets you sync your Twitter tweets with your Facebook status. You can specify how the app would do the synching either when you include a keyword on your Tweet,  sync ALL Tweets, sync ALL Tweets except for Tweets with keywords you specify.

Twitter – this is your standard Facebook app for updating your Twitter through Facebook.  The app was made by the Twitter folks themselves.

Twitter Updater – automatically post your status from Facebook to Twitter whenever you change your Facebook status.

Selective Twitter Status – also lets you update your Facebook status from your Twitter profile but you can select only the Tweets that you want to show in your Facebook status. You do this by ending your Tweet with “#fb”.

@Tweeter – lets you post new tweets on from your Facebook home page. It works both ways – post new tweets from Facebook and update Facebook status whenever you Tweet.

Twittervision – aside from letting you share your Twitter status to your Facebook friends, this app also lets you share your location, by Twittering “L:” + location.

Twitter Score – lets you rank your Twitter profile by your different Twitter page stats.

Grazr Twitter Reader -lets you browse a Twitter social graph starting with any individual Twitter user.

BlogIt - is not sole Twitter-related app, but it supports posting and sharing of content to your Twitter timeline.

As Seen On – similar with BlogIT, it also allows you to link your Facebook profile page with your Twitter account.

Web Presence – consolidates all your social networking profile including Twitter, into your Facebook profile page.

fTwitter - makes your current Tweet as your Facebook status.

On the issue of more control and relevance for Facebook activity streams – Facebook will be rolling out three improvements namely, live updating of activity streams, photo tagging which could be through third party app such as photo finder, and tools to control application content. Facebook will also be introducing more controls for the content filters which are listed on the left side of the Facebook home page. In addition, these controls would also cover filtering out Wall posts and content.

On the issue of the Highlights feature - this section will soon be updated more frequently and will soon show more content all throughout the day to be in congruence with the items in the Facebook News Feed stream.

On the issue of finding things more easily – some changes to expect include more prominence in displaying friend requests and event invites particularly moving the at the top of the right column, and easier for creating Friends List filter. In addition, the applications bookmarks will still continue to be displayed on the lower left portion of your Facebook home page.

On the issue of new vs old Facebook home page - For those wishing to have the option to revert back to the old Facebook design, sorry to disappoint you folks, but that won’t happen anymore. The new Facebook or should I say the current Facebook home page with all the new layouts and all are here to stay. So better get used to it.

So the issue here that would definitely earn the rage of Facebook users would definitely the last one. And since it seems that Facebook is not keen on giving the option to revert back to the old home page, will you still be using Facebook? or would you do your social networking somewhere else?

But unlike the Picasa application, Face.com’s Photo Finder will scan other social networking sites and your friends’ Facebook photo album to let you find photos of yourself or photos of your friends.

The application will use “Auto tagging” features to automatically identify photos that it finds from your friends’ photo albums. So, in a way it’s a good way of finding photos that your friends uploaded to Facebook that you may not be aware you are part of.

The application is about to roll out in closed alpha mode.  Techcrunch is giving away free invites which will keep you on the priority list of alpha testers who be the first to try out the application once it gets rolled out.

I really can’t wait to try out this application as most of my Facebook friends are not fond of tagging photos they upload on Facebook. So, if I don’t really get to know whether they’ve uploaded photos which I’m part of.

Reacting to the findings of the research, Mr. Stewart aired his concern regarding the direction that the increasing usage and dependence of people to social ntworking, is leading to. Mr. Stewart said:

“Time on social Networks, gaming, multimedia, gambling and humor are on the increase. It would appear that as Americans and Europeans come to terms with layoffs, redundancy and gloomy economic forecasts. Then the Internet is helping people not only when it comes to writing resumes and job searching but also by offering a low or no cost way to pass their time.”

Mr. Stewart also believes that the long term physiological effects of internet usage outweighs its short term psychological benefits.  The physiological effects is causing an increasing trend in the incidence of illness and premature mortality.

So, are you scared about the results of this study? Are you so dependent to social networking that you rarely interact in “real life” anymore?

Now if you’re worried that you might compromised your privacy setting, Facebook assures us that nothing of your privacy settings will be changed once you opt to open your Profile Page to “Everyone”.

But wait, before you chane anything from your privacy option, you should know that changing your profile setting to “Everyone” you will be opening your doors to comments, and other audiences reaction. This also means that anybody can access and view your Facebook profile even if they are not your Facebook contacts. Anybody who sees your updates, or found your profile through Facebook search would now be able the parameters you’ve set on your Facebook profile setting.

The positive side of opening your Facebook profile page to everyone is of course you’d gain more new friends, especially those who have stumbled upon your profile page accidentall.

So, what about the negative perspective? Actually the only problem I can see, which might not be a problem at all is the fact that you won’t be able to know who are checking your profile. 

So would you be opening your Facebook profile page to “Everyone?”

So, what does this mean really? It means that whenever you have achieved a high score in Tap Tap Revenge 2, you can share it with your Facebook friends, or have it appear on your Facebook profile updates.  Other games which started adapting Facebook Connect include the following:

• Agency Wars
• Binary Game
• iBowl
• Live Poker
• Tap Tap Revenge 2
• Urbanspoon
• Who Has the Biggest Brain?
• Whrrl

Those are a few but we expect to see more applications getting into this frenzy in the coming days. So expect your Apps Store to prompt you with updates for the apps that you have already downloaded. I’ve updated my Tap Tap Revenge 2 installation it is now Facebook Connect – enabled.

So, how do you enable Facebook Connect on the apps that support it? You’ll know it by checking the options link of the apps. If the app has adapted Facebook Connect you will be asked to login in to your Facebook account. 

So, what does this have to do with Google Friend Connect? and what does this mean to Facebook Connect? It’s not really hard to deduce. Facebook Connect has been battling it out with Google Friend Connect on the web, so the smartest thing to do for the Facebook Developers is to make Facebook Connect available to the most popular mobile handset today – the iPhone. And they did. The sweetest thing is they beat Google Friend Connect to it.

Imagine the implications of this development to Facebook Connect once all the apps available at the Apps Store have enabled Facebook Connect. Now who says Google has started conquering the world with the recent launch of Google Voice? Facebook is stealthy doing its part to spoil Google’s objective.

Friends on Fire works something like this. Once you’ve installed the application on your Facebook account, you’ll see a Yahoo map featuring pushpins that identify your location and your friends’ location on the map. You can add notes on your location or locations you’ve previously visited which your friends can see.  In a way, this application can be used for recommending a good place to visit, be it a restaurant, a club or anything.  The updates or notes you make on the map will be streamed to your Facebook news feed.

Friends on Fire is certainly a useful Facebook application but it will be more useful if a mobile interface would developed. Location-aware services can become useful only if its use on a mobile setting. The Facebook application would be rather useless if it stays as an application that sits on your desktop only.  

Another thing to consider is the fact that it will also be more useful if your friends would also install the application in their Facebook profile. Otherwise its social aspects will not be fully utilized.

But the good thing about this application is the fact that Fire Eagle is a Yahoo product, and it is indeed very interesting to see Yahoo joining the Facebook popularity wagon.