You’re gonna have to be logged in to Facebook for this

Of all of the social networking sites out there, I think Facebook has really got it down. The site itself is clean, functional, and minimal. Everything you want to get to is literally only a click (maybe two) away, which is great because you don’t really have to get mangled in layers of pages just to get to, say, someone’s photo album.

I’ll be the first to admit that I spend a lot of time on Facebook. Probably too much time, actually. Several nights in this past semester, I’ve already shaved a good hour away from actual work to just browse Facebook. Often times, it’s for no apparent reason whatsoever except to just find something to do that’s NOT my homework. Facebook serves that function quite well. I know from first-hand experience!

Anyway, it’s been a while now that Facebook released their API for developers to start creating apps for the website. However, up until now though, I haven’t really looked into the applications being built for Facebook. But this afternoon, I browsed around and played with some of the apps and I must say that some of them are pretty neat (but that doesn’t mean that the majority of them aren’t stupid).

You have to be logged in to your Facebook account to use the links that follow, but if you are, then do take these web apps for a little test drive. If anything, maybe you’ll just end up wasting a few minutes or so. Not that bad, eh?

So check these out:

A thousand words aims to make Facebook entirely from photos of you and your friends. It’s an interesting idea especially if you want to navigate to photo albums without all the mumbo-jumbo text. The trick however is actually finding your friends’ profile pictures since they are a bit small to begin with.

Friendly Views is another great one that fuses Facebook with Google Maps and gives you a visual interpretation of where all of your friends may be from.
Added bonus: If you use Google Calendar, you can export Facebook’s friend birthdays as an “.ics” file from the same site and import that into Google Calendar. That way, you have your Facebook friends’ birthdays along with your Google Calendar sessions. Nice.

Speaking of birthdays, did you know that Facebook lets you see birthdays as a list by month??
And shoot, I didn’t know Facebook saved your previous profile photos in a separate profile photo album. To get there, you just click on your current profile photo.

Ok, it’s a slow Sunday. Sue me.