I tried to resist. Really, I did. The API launched, and the first Facebook Apps appeared, and they were terrible. Awful. Hideously ugly beasts that clogged up profiles, spread themselves like viruses, and served no useful purpose.

And that still describes a lot of the Facebook Apps, especially those from companies like Slide and RockYou.

But out of the gloom have appeared a small number of apps that do genuinely useful and interesting things. And now I’ve added several of them to my profile. This is absolutely not a comprehensive list, but a violation of any of the below criteria will exclude an app from inclusion:

1. The app must display something of real-world interest on my profile. I don’t need the world to know how many buckazoids I have. In addition, the profile box must be compact, in line with the Facebook design, and not filled with irrelevant links or advertising.

2. The app must not force non-users to “add” it before they can interact with it. I only started experimenting with the API recently, but my understanding is that it used to be more difficult to do this. At any rate, with the API in its current state, it’s easy to have an app that can be interacted-with by a non-user, so there’s no longer any excuse. If I see a button that I can click to send someone some cowbell, I shouldn’t have to log in to do so. I should be able to send anonymous cowbell, and then log in if I want to be named.

3. The app must not have soliciting members as a primary activity within the app. I had a brief encounter with a “Dance Friends” app that gave each user a tally of dance points—already a violation of Criteria #1. But worse, you got 2 points for dancing with someone, and 25 for inviting a new person to the app. It’s a pyramid scheme: the only way to really get ahead is to be first and pimp all your friends. If an app is interesting and worthwhile, people will voluntarily solicit the membership of their friends, or even better, their friends will simply see it, like it, and add it themselves. (And obviously, this rule automatically excludes Pirates, Ninjas, Vampires, and any others where the sole purpose of the app is recruitment.)

4. The app should do something interesting of a social nature. This could be as simple as advertising my actions in my feed, but the whole point of Facebook is friends, so it really ought to interact in a meaningful way with my list of friends, both those who have and do not have the app.

With that said, allow me to move on and actually endorse a few apps that I think understand and observe these principles.

The Few

Okay, here goes:

• TripAdvisor. I switched to this app from Where I’ve Been because I didn’t like the WIB profile box. For privacy reasons, Facebook doesn’t let apps put any “active” content in the profile box, which includes Flash and any onload JavaScript. Just static pictures and text, all of which are cached on the Facebook servers. This keeps performance up, and also prevents apps from using http referers to infer who is viewing what profiles. However, it meant that the WIB app was a really lame standard image, until you actually clicked it to load the Flash app. TripAdvisor, on the other hand, would actually render each user a custom static image with a world maps containing their embedded pins. In the spirit of Criteria #1, I switched to the app with a more interesting profile box. Since that time, WIB has begun doing the same thing, but I still find TripAdvisor’s map a little simpler and easier to use.

• Visual Bookshelf. An app that links to Amazon products has an obvious business model—referral fees. I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or not, but it hasn’t affected the amount of advertising on this application’s canvas pages. Ugh. I don’t particularly like this app’s default appearance, but it’s configurable enough that I could get it looking how I liked. And its developers understand about social features. There’s been lots of effort put into pushing your activity information into the feeds, and when you write reviews of books, they become available to other users of the app. There’s also a recommendation engine at work, but I can’t tell if it’s just pulling in recommendations from Amazon, or if it’s actually based on the contents of your friends’ bookshelves. Either way, it’s an avenue for presenting information I like having on my profile.

• BoomBox. When the apps platform first launched, one of the model apps was called Audio. It was a simple flash audio player that lived in one’s profile. You could point it at any MP3 and it would let profile viewers play the song. No logging in, no soliciting membership, no fancy playlists, just an audio player. Eventually, Audio was moved from just linking to MP3s to accepting uploads. And at that point, it got killed off for flagrant copyright violation. In the wake of Audio’s demise, a number of apps have tried to fill the void, including Audibie, Audio 2.0, and also others with more of a marketing slant, like the ubiquitous iLike. Each has a slightly different flavour of the same concept, but I like BoomBox’s approach. You can put a nice compact player on your profile, with as many songs as you like, as long as you host the content (illicit or otherwise) yourself. (Update: Boombox has fallen prey to the Man and been erased from existence.)

• Scrabulous. This one I resisted for the longest time, and now that I’ve tried it, I’m not entirely sure why. Yes, the game itself is in Flash, and the interface is not the greatest, but on every other point Scrabulous does things incredibly right. For example, I was invited to play over IM, entirely outside of the Facebook invitation system, and when I went to the Scrabulous app page, I was able to log in and start into a game without ever having to “add” the app or get a profile box. Very classy, especially for such a venerable app to stay on top of new platform developments like this. The biggest problem Scrabulous faces is a legal one outside of the software itself—Hasbro are making asses out of themselves by trying to sue the boys from India who are responsible.

As a final mention, I have to plug my nascent app, Wikipedia Articles. It’s pretty simple, but there are already a few dozen users enjoying it, and it’s been fun to experiment with developing a simple mashup using AppJet.

So, anything else worth using on Facebook?

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 11:56 pm to Internet.