Facebook's making some big changes around its application platform, particularly concerning how much access apps have to a user's activity stream and notifications. If you're a Facebook user who hates app spam, that's good news for you. It's terrible news for developers, though, because getting their links in front of you is how they spread virally and pick up more users.

This doesn't mean that apps won't be able to communicate with their users. They're getting put back into the sidebar, and that (virtually useless) boxes tab is going away. App and Game notifications will be handled by a new sidebar dashboard, moving them out of your stream once and for all.

Email will also figure more prominently in the user-developer relationship, with developers getting the option to ask users for their email addresses and send notifications that way.

Facebook isn't mincing words about what it's trying to do, here. In the official blog post announcing the changes, they come right out and say they're trying to cut down on spam: "Application communication in channels like notifications and requests aren't effectively serving their original purpose. There is a significant opportunity to improve the user experience and reduce spam by replacing them with better features and moving most communication to the stream and Inbox."

Take that, Farmville!

[via TechCrunch]

I'm willing to bet that while reading Download Squad, you've discovered some great applications that you now use on a regular basis.

Although we all use our machines in a slightly different way, I always find it fascinating to hear about which applications other people use and often when chatting to friends or colleagues I'll learn about an application that i've never used before - there's nothing like a personal recommendation.

That's where our new feature - 'Tell DLS: What are you top 10 must-have apps?' - comes in!

Each week, a Download Squad team member is going to share their top 10 applications are on their chosen platform and explain why! We'll be covering Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and the mobile operating systems, so hopefully you'll discover some gems that you hadn't used before too.

Of course, being a 'Tell DLS' feature, we want this to be all about sharing your experience too - so please post your chosen top 10 in the comments.

Read on after the jump for my top 10 (how many can you identify from the icons above?).

On the heels of last week's release of @mentions and the new Facebook Lite, today Facebook announced "Prototypes".

Prototypes give users a chance to test out cool new applications and functionality "going on inside the walls of Facebook" and to provide feedback to the who built the prototypes, directly.

To begin testing and providing feedback, simply find any application available in the Application Directory that is marked as "Prototype". Some cool examples that have come out of Facebook prototype apps include Desktop Notifications for Mac, recent comments filters and enhanced event emails.

Think of Prototypes much like the recently released Mozilla Test Pilot; Giving users the chance to opt-in to new features not quite ready for primetime.

According to Facebook's Developer Blog, big changes are coming to the application directory, which will affect both developers and everyday users. With over 52,000 apps now available, the Facebook team, they're looking at new ways to highlight the best apps and help users discover the ones most relevant to them. This should deliver a much-needed image boost for Facebook, and help combat the impression that Facebook apps are all cheap pirates-vs-ninjas spam.

The plan includes verified apps, which developers can have vetted by Facebook for a fee. The ones that meet Facebook's standards will be bumped to the top of search results in the app directory. This looks like a win-win, where Facebook gets money, developers get more exposure, and users get better apps.

Also, users will now see an activity feed on the app directory page, showing which apps their friends have used lately, hopefully leading to more relevant results. The application categories are also getting their first reboot since '07, making finding the best apps that much easier.

If you don't want to wait for these changes to start finding the most useful apps on Facebook, you can always check out my top 10 list on Download Squad.

[via Webware]

Used to be desktop applications were essential to getting the job done, whatever the job may have been, large or small. Now, with all the nimble web apps to choose from, the idea of firing up a huge application for a small task seems almost, well, unproductive and wasteful.

Yeah, sure, no one is suggesting you do away with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, Quickbooks and other heavy hitters. However, there are excellent tools on the web where less, in many ways, is actually more. Here are 10 of my favorites.

1. ScribeFire - essential Firefox add-on for bloggers. Allows you to to easily drag and drop formatted text from the Web into your blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser.

2. Firefox - great web browser whose charm lies in all those irresistible add ons that make the whole interwebs experience that much sweeter. Once you pimp out your Firefox, it seriously is difficult to function on anything else. Yes, there are the crashes and other peccadillos, but they're easy enough to overlook especially if you are truly in love.

3. Skitch - this is the best, quick image editor and photo sharing web app that is dead simple to use. For quick screenshots and sharing photos, you cannot beat it. For Mac only though. Sorry.

4. Gmail - I've done away with Outlook and Mail and rely on Gmail for several reasons: free, 7090 MB capacity, integration with Google calendar, Gtalk, great search functionality, and the portability is sweet.

5. Google Reader - free, powerful feed reader which allows you to share items with your friends and slog through all your news feeds as fast as your bleary eyes will let you. Bonus - I'm playing with Feedly (Firefox extension) which provides a magazine like start page of your feeds with complete Google Reader integration and Twitter and FriendFeed and more. So far I like, but Google Reader is still number one for now.

We are a little bit disturbed. Not in a "We just watched a David Lynch movie" sort of way, but still, it is a little unnerving to think that our last post on Ulteo hinted at a world domination plot... and now it seems that goal is within their reach.

It is also a little unsettling to eat our words. We read about Ulteo's Virtual Desktop and its claims to run Linux apps quickly and smoothly under Windows. And we thought, "Yeah, right." We've used embedded Linux on Windows before. It works in a pinch, but it's not terribly responsive. It's also a little disorienting to be working in Linux, and then need to manually perform some key combination or mouse gesture to get to a Windows application.

Like andLinux, Ulteo's Virtual Desktop (often referred to with the rather misfortunate name UlteoVD) runs off a coLinux base. There is no virtualization software involved. But we'd especially recommend UlteoVD for those pondering whether a Linux switch could work for them, for a number of reasons.

The "social networking" space is chock-full of applications, plug-ins and other bits and pieces designed to hopefully enhance the user's experience online and potentially in their real lives as well. Unfortunately, some of these applications or plug-ins are often uninspired and do little, if anything, to accomplish this goal.

Sometimes, however, an application or plug-in is able to provide user's with useful services and a forum to express themselves. Case in point, "Where I've Been," an application and a stand-alone website which can actually enhance the user's experience by providing useful tools such as travel-related tips, interactive maps and a forum to showcase and discuss where they've traveled to.

At the helm of "Where I've Been" is CEO Michael Dalesandro who, in a short time, has managed to transform "Where I've Been" from its humble beginnings into a very successful application in use by millions of users each day. Recently, I sat down with with him to discuss "Where I've Been," what it does and where its going.

CHRIS ULLRICH: Michael, thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

MICHAEL DALESANDRO: Not a problem.

CU: How and when did you first get involved with "Where I've been"?

MD: Craig Ulliott was working for Blueye.com as a developer when he brought me the concept for "Where I've Been." He wrote the application and then it launched on Facebook first. That's where it all started.

CU: For someone unfamiliar with "Where I've been", can you describe it?

MD: "Where I've Been" is a simple way for people to connect and express themselves primarily through their travel experiences. It allows the user to highlight their travels graphically and show what places, cities, countries they've been to.

The can share where they have been, where have lived and where they want to go with friends, family and others.

CU: How does "Where I've been" benefit the user? Why should someone use it?

For those who have hoped for less application madness on Facebook, an announcement on the Facebook Developers blog should be of interest to you: a reward system for applications that are "compelling."

So, instead of giving applications a limit of 40 notifications per user per day, the amount of notifications sent out will adjust in accordance with the feedback an application gets. The more an application gets ignored, reported as spam, or hidden, the less notifications users will receive. The aim of this little adjustment is to reduce notifications that users will find to be of a "spammy" nature, while encouraging developers to make applications that users will want their friends to know about.

Whether that means that notifications of friends adding or using applications that have gotten a "bad rep" will start disappearing, is still not clear. But, it's reasonable to think that some of the notification "noise" will be reduced.

In the meantime, until the update is put in place, developers will be provided with two new "Insight" statistics tabs, to give them a better understanding of how users are responding to their applications. Users can expect to start seeing changes as early as next week.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Love them or hate them, Facebook applications are what makes the social networking site what it is. Back when MySpace, Friendster, and other sites let you connect with friends, leave messages, and maybe even play some music, Facebook let you send snowballs, play Scrabble, and graph your bestest friends.

The only problem with Facebook applications is that up until now, you've had to actually visit Facebook to access them. OK, sure, that makes sense. But as Google promotes its OpenSocial initiative which will let people develop applications that can run on any website, Facebook's approach was starting to look a bit antiquated.

Now Facebook has upped the ante by releasing a JavaScript client library that lets you add a Facebook application to any site. That means you can visit Joe Schmo's home page and still play a game of Scrabulous with your Facebook contacts. You know, if Hasbro and Mattel don't shut it down.

There appears to be some debate in the developer community about how significant this announcement was. Facebook had already released an API for writing applications. And some developers have created applications that can be hosted on other sites. But by releasing the JavaScript library, developers can create multi-site applications that do not require any server-side code, making it incredibly easy for anyone to embed an application on their site.

[via All Facebook]

It used to be that a USB thumb drive was used mainly for transporting files to and from computers. Now, however, more people are using thumb drives to house portable applications. When you sit down at a computer that doesn't have Firefox, for example, and you're simply unwilling to double-click that Internet Explorer icon, just pop in your thumb drive, double-click your portable Firefox application, and surf away--no installation necessary.

Lists of portable applications are as old as the applications themselves, but lists of portable Mac applications are more rare. Over at Web Worker Daily, they have counted up and listed eleven portable applications for your Mac. Favorites on the list include Adium, that ubiquitous multi-protocol chat client, Bean, a lean and mean text editor, and iStumbler, a small app designed to find all wireless signals in your area, including Bluetooth, Airport, and Bonjour.

No longer will we envy those Geek Squaders with their multi-toned VW bugs and their keychain of portable thumb drives. Now we too can carry our USB drives with purpose. But unlike the Geek Squad, we will use our thumb drives for good, not for evil.

[Via Web Worker Daily]

The wait is over, DocSyncer is out of beta and open for all to use. This downloadable application allows PC based users of Microsoft Office and Google Docs to seamlessly sync documents.

DocSyncer is a downloadable application that sits on your computer and automatically finds and syncs all of your document files to your Google Docs account. When it's running, it checks all of your documents and syncs them as they are updated to create a solid backup and work anywhere system. Word and Excel based files can be opened directly from the web interface, and there is support for TXT, CSV and RTF formats.

Perhaps one of the coolest features is the 'disconnected' mode. If you are disconnected from the internet, DocSyncer will auto recognize it and load the document locally in the default application without trying to connect to the internet.

Yahoo! has launched an updated version of the Yahoo! Widget Engine and gallery. Yahoo! Widget Engine 4.5 has the same look and feel on your desktop as version 4.0, but there are some changes in the way widgets are created and organized.

First, Yahoo! has retooled its online widget gallery to give you more information about what each widget does. Users now also have a quick view of the most downloaded, highest rated and newest widgets, and can share Widgets directly with friends on IM, email, a Yahoo! Widget badge, del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit.

Second, there's now support for Flash and HTML based widget design. Yahoo! has also teamed up with the NBA to vote on All Stars, RockYou to create and watch slideshows on the desktop, and the Netvibes UWA will now be available as a Yahoo! Desktop Widget from the Netvibes Ecosystem. And if you still aren't satisfied, Yahoo! Finance has also improved their powerful stock Widget.

Check out a screeenshot of the new RockYou Yahoo! Widget after the jump.

With more and more users building documents in web based applications, we were starting to think the market belonged to a handful of new companies like Zoho, ThinkFree, and a little upstart called Google. But it looks like there's another serious contender in the online Office space.

Live Documents has a strong pedigree. The service comes from the guy who created Hotmail before Microsoft purchased the webmail service. Live Documents are flash based office applications that have the ability for collaboration and online and offline syncing in a MS Office based environment. Applications are similar to Microsoft's traditional Word, Excel and Powerpoint, but are built using Flash and Flex so that any user on any system can view and edit at will in a richer multimedia environment. If the web portion doesn't do anything for you, the desktop client might with its offline abilities. It wraps up MS Office through a plug-in and embeds collaboration options into them as well, making it possible for multiple people to edit documents at the same time keeping them secure and allowing for revision controls.

Live Documents is not currently live, but you can request to try out their office solution on their website. We are awaiting an invite, and will report back if it's a worthwhile contender when we actually see it in action.

Here at Download Squad HQ, we install and uninstall a lot of applications, tweak a lot of settings, and do a whole bunch of other things that generally makes Windows unhappy with us.

When I brought home my shiny new laptop running Windows Vista Home Premium earlier this year, I didn't know how lucky I was. My new PC shut down when I asked it to, slept when I closed the lid, and didn't cause glitches every time I started playing audio.

After spending some time pulling my hair out trying to get to the bottom of things, I figured the easiest way to solve some of my problems would be just to do a clean install of Windows. While programs like CCleaner are great for dusting the cobwebs of your windows registry, nothing works as well as reformatting the hard drive.

Of course, this was also an excellent opportunity to make sure I have a good backup of all my important data files, and to download and install just the applications that are most important to me in daily life. So after the jump is a list of the applications I started loading on my PC after restoring Windows. We'd love to know what programs you can't live without and what are the first things you load on a new PC?

OutTwit
OutTwit makes it possible to read Twitters through Outlook. Your Twitter status can be updated straight from Outlook and you can set certain intervals at which your Twitter account is checked for new messages.