I was forwarded Adam Ostrow’s post on Mashable today from Joel Kunert & it was worth sharing since some of these applications I hadn’t even heard of before. 

As opposed to the relatively new Digg API, the Facebook API has been available to developers since the summer. With more than 100 applications now featured in the Facebook Developers Product Directory, we decided it was time to cut through the clutter and pick out the ten that we think add the most value to the Facebook experience:

1.) Facebook Toolbar for Firefox – This application extends the Facebook experience to the browser. You receive automatic notifications of friend requests, new messages, and can check what your friends are up to in the “Facebook Friends Sidebar” feature. The toolbar also comes with the “share” link which allows you to quickly import and share any web site with your Facebook friends.

2.) rendezbook – Serving as an anonymous “MeetMe @ HotOrNot” type service, rendezbook lets you identify Facebook friends as someone you a) would like a stronger friendship with b) would like to date or c) would like to have a “random fling” with. Your preferences are anonymous, until of course the person you desire indicates the same feeling. The homepage claims more than 1,700 users so far, with a surprising 200+ matches already. I have left all boxes unchecked in this example:

3.) CampusRank – This site allows you to nominate people in the type of categories you might expect to find in a yearbook – Best Smile, Campus Clown, and even “Metrosexiest.” The service doesn’t appear to have a whole lot of traction yet, but perhaps they’re just waiting to show off users once they have more nominees.

4.) Friend Analyzer – This tool shows you which of your friends are most similar to you in a variety of categories. You can also see what the most popular items are in your network. It appears that I have rather feminine taste in music:

5.) College-Roomies – This service lets you search for other students looking for a roommate at your school. In addition to being able to check out the Facebook profiles of other students in search of housing, there is a cool split screen feature where you can see housing preferences (for example, cleanliness, smoking habits, etc.) that prospective roommates that they have filled out on the College-Roomies site:

6.) Your True Self– This site is built around the premise that “your friends say a lot about you.” It analyzes your friends’ political views, favorite movies, music, television shows, and books to guess at things that you might like. For example, 5 of my friends like Family Guy, so Your True Self indicates that I might like it:

7.) The Friend Match – This service randomly pairs up two of your friends and allows you to rate on a 5 star scale how good of a dating match you think they make. If someone has matched you with someone else, you can see it under “My Matches.” I’m pulling a big goose egg so far.

8.) FbCal.com – The Facebook Birthday Calendar Generator creates an iCalendar (.ics) file with your friends and their birthdays that can be imported into iCal, Sunbird, and Google Calendar. For Outlook users, there is the Facebook Birthday Exporter.

9.) Facebook to Twitter – Facebook and Twitter in the same application? How have these guys not received millions in VC funding already!?  In reality “FT” will save you maybe 37 seconds per year, as you need to point to the fbtwit.com site each time you want to automatically post your Facebook status to Twitter. Additionally, Facebook recently added the ability to update via SMS, so it’s unlikely many Facebook users will care much about updating Twitter with the same status message.

10.) Votetronics – This simple voting application allows you to setup a poll that only your Facebook friends can participate in. It seems like this would be an easy and logical feature for Facebook to add to the main service, as polls and surveys are always popular on social networking sites.

10 Awesome Things Built on the Facebook API

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As I sit at my desk and wind through the last few emails in my inbox for the year I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of our clients who made 2008 a great year for Pleth. 

I also would like to wish everyone a Happy & Prosperous 2009!  If there is anything my partners and I can do for you or your business this next year, whether it’s Business Cards, Printing, Graphic Design, Web Development, Web Hosting, or Email solutions, don’t hesitate to drop us a line.  We would love the opportunity to work with you in 2009! 

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Wordpress 2.7 has only been out for a short time but the folks at Automattic and the Wordpress Developer community are already looking forward to version 2.8.  If you haven’t already upgraded to 2.7, you should do so pretty quickly.  It’s a major redesign of the backend / dashboard.  I have slowly migrated my clients over to the new version and given them an opportunity to ask questions and find their way around before I turned the reigns back over to them and for the most part everyone seems to be very impressed. 

From a usability standpoint, actions that used to be 3 clicks in the old dashboard are now 2 clicks, and in some cases 1 click.  A lot of care was also taken to ensure that most plugins would continue to function correctly inside version 2.7 as well, I haven’t had any of my core plug-ins fail so far w/ 2.7 and that’s pretty phenomenal considering most major releases will clash w/ plugins like PodPress just about everytime, but the last 2 releases from Wordpress have went so smoothly that PodPress continued to function w/out updating. 

Jane Wells posted an entry on the Wordpress Blog today about version 2.8 and gives us some hints as to what we might expect in the next release candidate!

Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8

By Jane Wells. Filed under Development, Features.

Everyone knows by now that WordPress 2.7 is packed with new features. Now that it’s available (almost 600,000 downloads as I write this!), it’s time to start working on 2.8. There were dozens of things that got tabled during 2.7 due to time constraints, and there are a lot of high-rated features in the Ideas forum, so there are a lot of potential features under consideration.

Right now, the lead developers are thinking the top priorities for 2.8 will be widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades. The rest of the development time will be taken up with bug tickets and additional features/enhancements from a prioritized list. To that end, we’ve posted a new survey for you to help us prioritize features for 2.8. The list pulls from the developers’ “2.7 leftovers” list as well as the most popular features from the Ideas forum. Just rank each feature and tell us your top pick (up to three). You also have the option of adding comments or additional suggestions, but this is not mandatory. For your response to count, you must rank all of the features in the list. The survey has only one page.

Note that media features are not included in this list as we will be posting a separate survey for media-specific features soon.

Cast your votes any time this week, but as always the sooner the better. This survey will close at noon on December 31, 2008 UTC.

In the new year, we will be reviving scheduled IRC developer chats, where the lead developers will discuss the week’s progress on feature development, providing opportunities for people to ask questions or make suggestions. These will be held early in the day on Wednesdays (U.S. Wednesday), and the specific time will be posted here on the development blog once it’s been finalized.

As a related aside, we spent a significant amount of time during 2.7 development sifting through Trac tickets that really shouldn’t have been there. Feature ideas and requests do not belong in Trac, they belong in the Ideas forum. Please reserve Trac for reporting bugs and things that need fixing (typos, code enhancements, etc.). If you are asking for a new UI, a new feature, or a new approach to coding something, that’s not an enhancement, it’s a new feature. New features will be entered into Trac by developers once it has been determined that the feature should be included in core. To help speed up development, moving forward we will close Trac tickets that are actually feature requests, with the comment that they should be posted in the Ideas forum instead. Please help the developers maximize their time by following this guideline.

WordPress › Blog » Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8

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I know that there are probably in Denver with stronger feelings about this than I do but I sure didn’t see the firing of Mike Shanahan coming today, I really didn’t.  Sure, their season fell apart toward the end of the season, but who in the world are you going to get to replace him? 

Out of all of the bad coaches in the NFL, like the one in Dallas, why in the world would you want to fire a guy who has brought you two superbowls and numerous conference titles over the past 21 years??  This is certainly beyond me.  Again, I didn’t see this one coming…

I found this on ESPN.com:

The longtime face of the Denver Broncos will change.

The team announced on Tuesday that Mike Shanahan has been fired and will relinquish his duties as head coach and executive vice president of football operations.

In a statement, Broncos owner Pat Bowlen said: “After giving this careful consideration, I have concluded that a change in our football operations is in the best interests of the Denver Broncos. This is certainly a difficult decision, but one that I feel must be made and which will ultimately be in the best interests of all concerned.

Shanahan has coached the Broncos since 1995 and won back-to-back Super Bowls in the 1997 and 1998 seasons. But Denver has not made the playoffs in the last three years.

The Broncos collapsed this season, finishing 8-8 after having a three-game lead in the division. With the AFC West title on the line, the Broncos were routed by the Chargers 52-21 on Sunday.

“I appreciate the 21 years that Mike Shanahan has given to the organization as an assistant and head coach, and the two Super Bowl wins in that time,” Bowlen said. “His contributions hold a special place in Broncos history.”

Bowlen said that the team will hold a news conference on Wednesday morning to make the announcement, and Shanahan will speak shortly thereafter.

ESPN - Denver Broncos fire Mike Shanahan after season falls apart

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There was a great article on Wired.com this morning about 6 new web technologies that emerged in 2008 that everyone needs to use now.  Michael Calore did a great job in this piece, be sure to check out what the top one deals with, Digital Identity!

Every year, we see scores of innovations trickle onto the web — everything from new browser features to cool web apps to entire programming languages. Some of these concepts just make us smile, then we move on. Some completely blow our minds with their utility and ingenuity — and become must-haves.

For this list, we’ve compiled the most truly life-altering nuggets of brilliance to hit center stage in 2008: the ideas, products and enhancements to the web experience so huge that they make us wonder how we got along without them.

Nitpickers will notice that a couple of these technologies arrived two or three years ago. Others aren’t even fully baked yet. But each innovation on our list reached a level of maturity, hit the point of critical mass, or stepped in to fill a burning need during 2008 that resulted in it significantly changing the landscape of the web.

Here’s to the technologies currently making the web a better place than it was 12 months ago.

Identity Management

Few things carry more value than your digital identity, and yet most web users have only a tenuous grasp of it. That’s because on the social web, identity is no longer just who you are. It’s who you know, how you know them and how much you want them to know about you. On the web, your identity is explicitly tied to your relationships, both with your friends and with the websites you visit.

Three great technologies came to fruition this year to help you manage these complex interdependencies: OpenID, Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.

These ID systems all offer a way to take control of your social capital, that cache of “friend data” you carry with you as you sign up for and use different web services. They also all offer a more tangible advantage — an easy way to log in to any website using one set of credentials. You get one virtual ID card that gives you access to hundreds of websites. As a bonus, you don’t have to go through the painful process of filling out a profile and adding or approving friends on every new blog, community or social network you want to join.

The end of 2008 saw a flurry of activity around identity. Facebook Connect, which currently lets you log in to a few dozen high-profile websites using your Facebook ID, went live the first week of December. Google’s Friend Connect and MySpace’s MySpaceID, similar systems that aren’t yet as widely adopted, launched soon after it.

There’s a hitch, though. Facebook Connect, while elegant and easy to use, is built on proprietary code and isn’t compatible with the offerings from Google and MySpace, which are built using OpenID and other open source standards.

We should expect this battle for your personal data play out over the next year, maybe longer. But 2008 will be remembered as the year that identity stepped into the spotlight.

HTML 5

One of the most important technologies on this list doesn’t fully exist yet — HTML 5 — but in 2008, key features started to trickle out.

HTML 5 will eventually replace HTML 4.01, the dominant programming language currently used to build web pages. But the governing bodies in charge of the web are still drafting the details, and nobody expects HTML 5 to fully emerge as the new standard for at least a few more years.

But HTML 5 is no vaporware. Many of the changes to the way the web operates as outlined in early versions of the new specification are already being implemented in the latest browsers, and some of the web’s more adventurous site builders are already incorporating HTML 5’s magic into their pages.

HTML 5 will be great step forward, standardizing things like dragging and dropping elements on web pages, in-line editing of text and images on sites and new ways of drawing animations. There’s also support for audio and video playback without plug-ins, a boon for usability and a worrisome sign for Adobe’s Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Apple’s QuickTime. The language will also give a boost to web apps, as there are new controls for storing web data offline on your local machine.

Want Gmail on your desktop? HTML 5 makes it possible. Alas, the blink tag isn’t invited to the party.

Lifestreaming

A new breed of social app has arisen to help us manage the mess of information overload — the lifestream.

Not long ago, keeping track of your friends on the internet was pretty easy. Everyone belonged to Friendster or MySpace and that was it. Now, the web is littered with thousands of social sites, each with its own special purpose — Flickr for photos, Last.fm for music, Twitter for tweeting. Even the most rudimentary services are tied to the social web. Renting a movie, buying a book or writing a blog post? Let all your friends on Netflix, Amazon and Blogger know about it.

Keeping tabs on your friends now is all too easy and all too much, all at once.

Sites like FriendFeed, Plaxo Pulse and Digsby serve as social-network-activity aggregators. They’re like virtual funnels. Dump in all the notifications, feeds and updates from your various networks, and the services will bring it all into one master stream, relieving you of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites to learn what your friends are up to, what they’re listening to, who they’re snogging and so on. Controls let you dial back the flow by sorting and filtering the flow, pruning it down to only what matters most.

Many such services have emerged, but FriendFeed, an elegant and simple site designed by a crew of ex-Googlers, is our favorite.

Oh, and don’t expect to be able to add Facebook to your lifestream. The network lets all sorts of data in, but precious little out.

Firefox 3

Firefox has been around since 2004, but when version 3 of Mozilla’s browser arrived in June 2008, it got everything right. Mozilla’s browser is faster and more secure than ever before, and it’s open source, so you get the feel-good factor, too.

One of the most highly anticipated software releases of the year, more than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 on the first day. Third time’s a charm, indeed.

The genius bit of engineering was bringing search front and center — just type what you’re looking for in the location bar, and FF3 searches your history, bookmarks and the web to bring you the page you want, lightning fast.

Performance enhancements made it one of the web’s fastest browsers — especially for surfing the recent swell of web apps — and improved security features made it one of the safest.

Mozilla continues to build upon the concept with its Ubiquity add-on for Firefox, which lets you search and interact with any number of web services by typing text commands into the browser.

It’s still the second-most-popular browser after Microsoft Internet Explorer by a wide margin, but Firefox 3 is the feisty favorite of the web’s elite.

Google Chrome

Its debut release in September was not expected, nor was it greeted with as much fanfare as the arrival of Firefox 3 a few months prior. But Google’s browser was instantly recognized as a potential game-changer, both among browser-makers and within the world of web apps.

Chrome is a browser built to empower web applications.

Its killer feature is a new approach to page rendering that isolates web applications inside each of the browser’s tabs — a crashing web app might cause a single tab to go south, but that won’t affect anything outside that tab. The rest of the browser remains stable.

When you’re doing mission-critical work in a web app and the browser crashes, it isn’t an annoyance, it’s a deal breaker. E-mails are lost, documents have to be rewritten, web forms need to be filled out again. Chrome’s ability to sidestep a full crash strengthens Google’s bid to replace desktop apps with its own web-based alternatives.

Chrome reached official 1.0 status in December. It’s Windows-only for now, but we should expect official versions for Mac and Linux soon. It’s also still very young. Future releases will have support for add-ons, offline syncing of web data through Google Desktop and — knowing Google — probably a few other bells and whistles nobody’s thought of yet.

Location Awareness

In 2008, location-based information ceased being a fancy add-on and instead became a requirement of any serious, successful web service.

Hit a button on your laptop or phone to tell a web service where you are, and it tells you what restaurants are close by, where the new Bond movie is playing (and when, and if there are tickets left), and which of your friends are within shouting distance if you need a date.

The tipping point arguably came when a wave of GPS-equipped mobile web devices hit the market. The iPhone 3G, the T-Mobile G1 and the latest Nokia N-series devices all have GPS built in. They also all have real web browsers and the tools necessary for access to web APIs, opening the door to more-relevant search and localized mobile services.

On the iPhone, you can use Yelp’s app to get a list of nearby venues, restaurants and hangouts with the touch of a button. Or, in the case of Google’s local-search app, you can simply speak your request and get local results. An app like Say Where queries multiple search sites.

The benefits aren’t limited to mobiles, either. Social networking sites and desktop search apps can take advantage of new technologies like Yahoo’s FireEagle, where users can update and store their location data, or browser plug-ins like Google Gears or Firefox’s Geode, which users can set up to report their location automatically.

Whether they’re using a desktop browser or an iPhone, users now demand the high levels of relevance and convenience on the web that location awareness affords.

The World Wide Web Consortium, the web’s governing body, has stepped up and formed a think tank to develop a set of standards for handling users’ geodata that ensures privacy and interoperability. The W3C Geolocation Working Group hopes to have its first recommendation filed by the end of 2009.

6 New Web Technologies of 2008 You Need to Use Now

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While I am a huge fan of Facebook Connect, I also have been rooting for OpenID to gain some traction as well as a universal login sharing solution but it just hasn’t gotten the attention that Facebook Connect has, and for obvious reasons, everyone is already familiar w/ Facebook and it’s one of the most recognizable brands in existence as well as the most trusted social network out there.

I was in a conference this past year in Tulsa and listened to a representative of Microsoft discuss how the MSN Passport or Live ID could be integrated in a very similar fashion on websites.  All through the presentation I kept waiting for him to at least mention OpenID but he never did, and of course Facebook Connect was so new then that no one really gave it any consideration either. 

In just a few short months I have seen several of the websites that I use on an everyday basis start utilizing Facebook Connect, a few more have been using OpenID as well, but I don’t get the impression that OpenID has caught on just yet.  I have pondered this and am just not for sure as to what needs to happen to give the platform more exposure.  Here’s a post I found on Sitepoint this morning:

As we noted in our year-end round up, 2008 was a good year for OpenID on paper, but the emergence of other, corporate backed single sign-on products means icy waters ahead. Specifically, we’ve talked about Facebook Connect and why it might end up the winner because it makes sense to consumers, and comes with social data attached. For developers, Facebook Connect is attractive as well because it comes with a built in marketing channel — user actions on external sites using Connect can be reported back to their friends on Facebook via the news feed.

In order for OpenID to compete on this new playing field, the OpenID Foundation needs to stop dragging their feet and start working on efforts to educate people about what OpenID is. On the technical site, OpenID is more or less a sound protocol — there hasn’t been any foot dragging there, but on the consumer outreach side, they’re getting beat. Badly.

Most people hav