I gave up on Boombox. For some reason, it removed itself from my profile, and when you view it (in firefox or safari) it looks funny, and I can’t even minimize the thing.

I found Jukebox though, and I tested to make sure it doesn’t require a login or someone else to add the application. It’s very barebones, but I like it. You can check it out on my profile page.

I don’t agree with “I shouldn’t have to log in to do so. I should be able to send anonymous cowbell”, though. At least, not in all cases.

Not having to log in to an app is great, but I’d be wary of allowing truly anonymous users (as in, anonymous to each other, and to the app developer) to submit content. Without knowing the user ID of the user (through logging in), you can’t track spam or block malicious users. Viewing content is fine.

Great article!

And it’s kind of a shame that it’s that sort of silliness holding up CSS3, when there are things in there (columns!) that web developers would have really liked to be able to use, like… last year.

sorry bout the insanely long url

This is frustrating, and it really affects the ability of an app like last.fm to be effective. I’ve been facing some of the same struggles with creating an app for Wordie, and I think the way other developers have been solving the problem (without resorting to a “refresh” button) is to simply piggie-back update requests on top of other user activity. So you have your cron job running that builds up a queue of updates due, and you just force them through in batches of twenty (or whatever) as part of other session queues.

The solution that Facebook has provided is Infinite Sessions, which is workable I guess, but has the side effect that you have to ask the user’s permission in order to acquire one. For something like an auto-updating last.fm box, the user should be prepared to grant it an infinite session, but it’s just one more barrier and confusing approval to have to grant.

30 Boxes’ calendar app looks somewhat promising, but I haven’t played with it nearly enough to judge. I believe it has some degree of iCal support for synchronization, but no idea how much.

So, anything else worth using on Facebook?

Not much. I purged off my application list last month, and the remaining serious ones are Scrabulous and the last.fm app.

Last.fm apps come in two flavours. I use it for a very specific purpose – the proper last.fm site takes ages to load and kills my slower computers when rendering, so I use What I’m Listening To for a quick check-up on what’s scrobblin’. It’s pretty neat in that it links your facebook friends who have one of the two official last.fm apps installed to their last.fm profiles. Unfortunately, it only displays your last.fm friends who’ve added the apps on facebook. And if you don’t use last.fm in the first place, it’s pretty useless.

Is the sun burning? is an amazing application, but I am afraid it does not pass your criterion #1.

Let’s see if I got the Markdown code right…