Sun, 8/5
No one’s doubting that Facebook’s application platform is burgeoning. But there are many, many bloggers (rightly) questioning the utility of these gimmicky widgets. Here are two app ideas that are so simple and provide so much utility that it confounds me that I have not found them in Facebook’s F8 App directory.
Private Friend Details
I’d like to make reminders and paste explanatory notes about friends without requiring their approval, particularly for professional contacts. I would be the only one able to view and edit these notes and they would be hosted in a small box under the profile photo of contacts I’ve annotated.
Whenever I collect a business card, I scribble a reminder about the situation or conversation attached to this person — things like “long discussion on May flight to NY about Facebook apps, lives in lake house he built himself in NJ and does freelance IT work” — and then file it away for recall when we trade emails later. Since inevitably these people friend me on Facebook, I’d like to make these private, scribbled notes actually “stick” to my contacts so that every time I view their profiles or see that they have updated information, I can get a quick reminder of our relationship.
This is particularly handy for those wishing to use Facebook for business (a contested topic currently) and need to maintain contacts and acquaintances with references to information that is inappropriate for sharing with an entire friend network.
Generic Feed Aggregator
I want an app that takes the last n headlines from my blog or selected feeds and displays them as a linked list. Disarmingly simple, right? (Yes, this is sort of available with Posted Items, but that doesn’t update dynamically.)
Several apps display recent headlines from various blogs and newspapers, but very few will aggregate custom items. And when using those that do, you’re still stuck with with the app’s specialized title “MyFeed RSS stuff” or “Blogs I Like.” We really need a generic widget for displaying a feed (or aggregation of a few feeds) with a customizable app heading. The feed aggregator app would display headlines and a tiny icon for the item type next to it. So new blog posts might have a notepad icon, blog comments a quote bubble, and YouTube videos a TV screen. These icons could be customizable of course or you could just pull from some available defaults.
This is an example of a larger substandard in Facebook’s utility - we need ways to bring web content into Facebook in a non-themed, non-branded, non-things-I-like-and-places-I’ve-been way.