Like a lot of you, I’ve largely outgrown my trust for Facebook applications. The truth is, most of these really are ‘just for fun’, which means you have to wade through spam, survey schemes and dysfunctional applications to find your way to something useful.
There are more than enough of these useful Facebook applications though, and you’re missing out on a lot of the fun if you think it isn’t worth your time.
Here are four useful Facebook applications that actually improve your account.
PageRage Facebook Themes
It’s a huge plus that Facebook doesn’t offer graphical configuration like MySpace — we all know how that turned out. Facebook looks slick, clean, but it might just not be your thing. An all-round user friendly situation would be to customize how Facebook looks for you. That’s what we call a win-win solution.
PageRage allow you to do this, using a Firefox add-on and Facebook application; you’ll need both of these for it to work. Choose one of many Facebook skins you like from the PageRage gallery, and you’re all set. Mind you, this will only affect how you view Facebook on yourcomputer.
Docs for Facebook
Facebook recently announced Docs, a hybrid between Facebook and Microsoft Fusion to share documents, spreadsheets and presentations on Facebook. It’s no Google Docs or Microsoft Office replacement yet, but it goes a long way.
In the Docs application, you’ll be able to skim popular reads, browse your own and friends’ files, or upload new documents. Besides uploading or creating a new document, you can also create interactive files that use Facebook data; resumes, charts based on friends’ data and photo slideshows. This is where the Facebook integration really pays off.
Because the application is really just a Facebook front-end for the new Docs.com website, Facebook will redirect you when actually opening or creating a new document. Although full integration of the word editor (seen above) is still a thing of the future, other Facebook options are present on the Docs site, like posting a document to your Facebook wall.
Twitter Tab
Facebook and Twitter are often regarded as two great battling social media sites, but why should they; the two services couldn’t be more different and it’s only sensible (from a social media aspect) to pay attention to both.
The Twitter Tab application allows you to keep an eye on both from one website. In fact, you can monitor up to eight different Twitter accounts and customize the theme to match your Facebook page.
RSS Graffiti
RSS Graffiti is an entirely different kind of amazing. It’s especially useful if you host your own blog or website and have an RSS feed. With the ease of subscribing to a feed, you can start publishing posts to your Facebook. Mind, you can also use RSS Graffiti to post from sites like Flickr, Twitter, or Yahoo! Meme — you just need a valid RSS feed.
Setting up the application hardly takes a minute and you can start adding feeds right away. The application will prompt you for a feed name and URL by default, but you can configure a whole range of more advanced settings, including filtering, transforming the feed, and scheduling your updates.
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