5 Facebook Applications That Actually Serve a Purpose

Everyday I'm bombarded with invites from ridiculous Facebook applications. Most of these are nothing more than passing around cartoon images, people trying to find out who has a crush on them, or ridiculous "political" applications that don't do anything to help their causes.

Regardless, I wanted to highlight the few but useful or entertaining Facebook applications that I happen to use. There are so many useless applications that finding good ones can be difficult.

1. Mini Todo
http://apps.facebook.com/minitodo/
This is pretty straight forward. Although for general ToDo list needs, I recommend Todoist.com, this is handy if you spend a lot of time on Facebook. One nifty feature is the ability to have public lists. Friends on Facebook can check off tasks under these public lists to let you know they've taken care of it!


2. Honesty Box
http://apps.facebook.com/honesty/
Everybody's just a little bit narcissistic. This app lets people leave anonymous wall posts. You get some pretty interesting comments from people this way. Now if only you could couple it with an IP logger... (evil scheming)


3. TagSnag
http://www.toolsforfacebook.com/
This is a utility that will automatically download all pictures you are tagged in and uploaded by other people. If you're a linux user, note that it parses folders "windows style", so just upload them to the default directory and move them later. You'll see when I mean.


4. Twitter
http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/
As if my firefox TwitterBar extension weren't enough, I also like to be able to send twitter updates through Facebook. This will also synchronize your Facebook and twitter statuses.


5. MirrorBlog
http://apps.facebook.com/mirrorblog/
This app let's you synchronize with blogger or wordpress blogs. You can add rss feeds but further more, you can make posts directly from facebook (like the one I'm writing right now)!.

The Pirate Bay: Down Again?

[Update] For the past few weeks The Pirate Bay has had occasional downtime. In a recent blog entry, they referenced trouble with hardware and backup systems not kicking in when they were supposed to. The outages have been occurring about once or twice a week, but not normally more than six to ten hours at a time.