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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

Facebook barely scratching the surface of the platform's potential?

"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"?

Filed under: Internet, VoIP, Social Software, web 2.0

Iotum brings conferencing to Facebook


Iotum, whose tagline is "simply relevant", has made a name for itself in the voice 2.0 industry, combining VoIP technology with their own software wizardry to make life easier for busy telephone users, especially those holstering a Blackberry. Their next frontier is Facebook, the growing-like-a-weed social networking site that has a bent towards business-people and a larger user community than LinkedIn.

Making use of Facebook's API, Iotum created a conference-calling application that will allow Facebook participants to meet online. Iotum designed their conference call instances on Facebook to resemble Facebook events, giving the conferencing apparatus a familiar look and feel. Indeed, conferences can be tied to events so that they occur automatically, or you can do them ad-hoc. Right now, Iotum's Facebook add-on provides North American numbers for conferencing, with international numbers to be added later.

More than just chat tool, Iotum's Facebook voice conferencing lets you see the portraits of each Facebook participant before and during the conference--something, which, once you've done it, seems peculiarly missing from traditional phone-service based conferences. Perhaps best of all, if you're supposed to be a participant in a call, the add-on will even send you a text message so you don't forget. Check out the full details, including screenshots. And here's the application itself.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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