"Funwalls." Free Conference Calls. "Gifts" in the form of bitmaps of red roses. Today's Facebook applications are heavy on the social and light on the networking, and techy thought-pioneer Tim O'Reilly says in a new report that today's Facebook apps aren't exactly making their developers wealthy. So it makes us wonder, are more promising applications around the next turn, or is social networking really the gimmick its detractors claim? Is the Facebook "platform" just a mechanism to drive more traffic into the web site when better, more obvious, pre-existing solutions exist outside the Facebook ecosphere?

While we think certain applications offer a compelling case, like eBay's offering, we're constantly amazed at how folks will try to pass off something that wouldn't make the cut for the O'Reilly Hacks Series as a legitimate add-on, like this so-called Skype-Facebook Mashup. With so many Facebook add-ons rolling around the bottom of the bit-barrel and receiving little to no attention, it begs the question, will anybody glean as much Facebook mindshare as iLike, or is Ken Camp correct when he refers to most Facebook apps as not "genuinely useful"?