The vast majority of Facebook applications are pointless games that open your profile up to marketing organizations to target advertising at you. I have stopped accepting invites to join applications that my friends send me unless they can tell me some useful purpose the application has.
For me the most useful applications are:
- LocalPicks by TripAdvisor. While I find TripAdvisor to be an annoying web presence and not very useful for booking travel or even researching travel, the LocalPicks application is very, very useful for rating and reviewing other people’s ratings of local restaurants. Useful enough that I am willing to let TripAdvisor harvest my data for targeted advertising that I ignore.
- Visual BookShelf by LivingSocial.com. I have no idea who the LivingSocial folks are, but it is useful to share and see what friends are reading now, and to read reviews of books online.
- Wine by Web Begole and Wine Beagles by some mystery group, these both allow you to review and read other’s reviews of different wines. Both look like good applications…
- Notes by Facebook, makes it easy to share blog entries with facebook friends. You can capture an RSS feed from another blog site if you like, or simply publish notes local to facebook. Useful for sharing information and news.
- Likewise the Facebook applications Posted Items and Photos help convey information, and in photos you can even tag sections of the photo which is useful for highlighting subjects in a photo and identifying them.
- Anyone know of other useful facebook applications?
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