Many people in the industry thought that the new Facebook Places feature will kill FourSquare. Far from it, usage has actually increased since Facebook rolled out Places.

I am personally addicted to Foursquare and am even the Mayor of my local pub (not sure that’s a good thing). But I always wanted to show off my badges on Facebook and my personal blog, unfortunately this option is rather limited with Foursquare. My Foursquare makes it easy to show your Foursquare badges, mayorships, and checkins on Facebook, your blog or your website. It’s free! You can push messages about your Foursquare checkins and mayorships to Facebook and Twitter as you achieve them, but there is no way to easily display all of your checkins, badges or mayorships across the web. A new app called My Foursquare makes it easy to display your Foursquare information on your Facebook profile, your blog, or your website.

You can display your badges, mayorships, last checkin, and last checkin on a Google map. The Facebook app shows up as a tab on your profile; the WordPress plugin shows up as a widget on your sidebar; and the javascript embed of code lets you show your stuff wherever you like on any website. My Foursquare has several customization options that make it easy to display your Foursquare stuff how you like. You can choose which elements you want to show (e.g. show just your badges, or show just your last checkin), and design customization options include variable widget widths, borders, colors and fonts.

The apps use Oauth authentication (which has become the new security standard) to connect with the Foursquare API, so that your personal Foursquare login credentials are safe and secure – they are never seen by My Foursquare.

About the developer
As well as putting together My Foursquare, Australian developer Dave McKinney is a UK Top 40 musician and producer, with several records out now including Flow
Dynamics, Soul Harmonics, & Rhibosome.

It appears that sharing page content is quickly becoming centered around the new Stream (for more information on the stream see the previous post about the new Facebook layout).  Facebook has also rolled out a new way for people to share pages with friends. You can now “suggest” links to your friends much in the same way you would invite friends to an application.  Here is what the invite friends feature looks like on our page.

This should help administrators encourage page users to share the page with their friends.  While applications are usually limited to around 10-20 invitations per user per day, there are no restrictions on page invitations.  This opens the door to quite of unwelcomed spam like invitations, which will hurt the application developers.   I am concerned that sooner or later Facebook is going to have to restrict this feature otherwise users will be inundated with invitations.

I thought it would appropriate the rate the most used application on Facebook, so here goes.  SuperWall by RockYou is by far the most popular application on Facebook today.  According to AppData, it has almost 16 million monthly active users.  Despite shedding about 5 million active users in December-January, it still holds the top spot for overall application usage.  I suspect the drop in user base will continue as the application finally matured and users are turning to something new.

The application itself is an upgraded version of the standard Facebook Wall feature.  SuperWall does not actually over-ride your existing Facebook Wall feature.  However, it does not appear where the regular wall feature is but instead appears under the Friends tab in the profile page.  It includes such enhanced wall features such as video embedding, eCards, graffiti, photos and comments.  Users can upload their own media or use pre-existing media that comes with the application (although I find the selections somewhat limited).  Videos can be grabbed from sites like YouTube (or pretty much any other site that offers videos) and the same goes for Photos.

The meteoric rise to the most used application status came because RockYou expanded on such an integral feature of Facebook, the Wall.  Although I find the features of the application somewhat mundane and dull it is miles ahead of anything similar out there right now and of course much more advanced than the standard wall feature.  As I have mentioned previous, expect the popularity of the application to decrease in the next few months as more and more people get tired of the app.  This could change unless the developers find a way to make it more existing.

Sometimes, I seem to forget to meet appointments, show up on time and generally be where I am supposed to be.  And by sometimes, I mean most of the time.  The Calendar application by 30 Boxes is perfect to help people like me stay organized.  It is a neat little application where one can add birthdays or important events and have it posted to their profile.  It can be fun to look at your friend’s calendars and find out what sort of events or parties are coming up.  If you forget someone’s birthday, you can go check out your friends’ calendars and find the correct date.  The calendar can be set up to send email notifications to yourself as a reminder when an event or birthday is happening.  Along the side of the calendar, you can see which of your friends have calendars and what was most recently added.  The calendar application is a neat concept, but I really wish you could do more with it, such as change the backgrounds or add more colors.  It’s a little bit bland and even boring.  It seems to be modeled after the Outlook event calendar, but you can do a lot more with that one.  As far as a Facebook application, it is okay since most people may also have a separate planner for day to day events.  It is fun though to see what is happening with your friends and to have the option to invite your friends to event you may have coming up.  As with any application, you can invite friends to view your calendar, a specific event, or an upcoming birthday.  It is a good tool to keep in further touch with your friends.  Combined with a mobile device like an iPhone, this application can really be a life saver.  You can receive alerts and reminders directly to your phone to make sure you are where you are supposed to be and on time.