Some of the important features of Invoicera are mentioned below. There are many, many other features which the software has but I think these are by far the most important to me as a Facebook app developer.

Multiple language and currency support – this feature helps you to create and send invoices to your clients in their respective language and currency. You can create invoices in 11 languages and also prefer the currency for your clients in which you want to invoice them.

Send invoice to multiple contacts – you can send invoices to more than one by adding multiple contacts as secondary contacts. For multiple businesses this feature is a major plus.

Recurring Invoicing into Auto Billing – this is very helpful when you have to send the identical invoices to the same clients at specific intervals.

It is an absolute delight using Invoicera a site which is very neat and quick. The site has an easy set-up and simply requires fill-up all essential information in no time. Moreover, it took mere minutes to figure out how to use the application. I found its user interface the most intuitive of the other similar application which I compared prior to choosing Invoicera.

After reading so much about Invoicera, I have an idea about the most obvious question in your mind right now, the pricing. Its basic plan is absolutely free which is introduced to test the functionality of the application but it has certain limitations. The paid plans of Invoicera start from $9.95 while the other two packages would cost you $19.95 and $49.95 respectively. If you would ask me to choose the best plan I would say I found that I got the most bang for my buck out of the $9.95 plan.

It has been an incredible experience using Invoicera, though you could find other alternatives in the market but none of them can beat up Invoicera in functionality, excellent support and competitive pricing. So if you are a freelance Facebook application developer such as myself, I would certainly recommend you try this software out.

When you add an event – you place it on the map, choose an icon and fill in the info about it. Everything in the process is straightforward, but there are two things you should know so that you have your events as you wanted them to be.
- Events’ icons, are managed via the INVENTORY. And One of the most important things in mapEvents is the level an event sits on. The higher level you choose, the more visible your event will be. Levels as well as icons(slots) of the events need to be activated with a crystal key. IMPORTANT: Events with no keys attached will fall to level (0) and lose their custom icons.

The mapEvents application is a hybrid between a Social Network and an Event Calendar. One thing is missing in the existing so far networks and applications: to make connection between people who have one and the same desires at the moment and the near future. This is where mapEvents comes in. The general idea of this social application/event calendar is to give possibility to the people to gather together in real and to do together things they love, not to be viewers, but real active participants. It does not only connect people according to their desires, but it is also able to answer the questions: What do you want? When? Where? How? With whom? How will this happen?

The main feature of this type of social application is that it will show what people want that happens in the future, where to happen and with whom, and that the users will be able to organize events at the moment or at least exchange messages.
People could also use mapEvents as a search engine for interesting people or people with similar interests, desires and ideas. For example, someone wants to meet a person who loves photography and leaves nearby. The person launches a search on mapEvents and finds several people interested in photography who live in the neighborhood.

In mapEvents you don’t only say where you are and what you are doing, but you also can say where you want to do something and you are searching for people who want to do this together with you. You post your wish on the right place on the map and other users with similar ideas add themselves to the event and this is how you make the wish come true. mapEvents is your instrument to do interesting things, to join interesting events, to find nice people and to be found by them. By using mapEvents you could see what people on the other side of the Earth do. For example, we have seen so far that a user will play tennis in Lithuania, that there will be a Yamaha event in Indonesia etc.

All in all a very useful and worthwhile application that you should definitely check out.

Here is an excerpt from the news on the deal.

But the most interesting thing Pleasants noted was that he recently heard (from his own source, apparently) that half of all users on Facebook now play social games. More impressively, 40% of total usage time on the service is spent on these games. That’s meaningful, of course, because “a huge amount the Internet is on Facebook,” Pleasants stated.

Did you catch that? 40% of usage time! That’s huge! think about it for a second from a marketing point of view. You know that 250 million users spend 40% of their time on Facebook playing games! Now all you have to do is target advertising inside those games and you are all set to make a fortune!

Read the full article on TechCrunch

Amongst these new feature is called “The Stream”.  The stream is manifested in the new layout of each users home page.  Essentially you will receive streaming notifications of everything that’s being shared by your friends and connections as it happens. The new layout will also provide you with more control by letting you choose exactly what you see in the stream and amongst the people and things you are connected to.

In addition the streaming information you are now getting, profiles for public figures and organizations once looked like pages, will now look more like user profiles. In the same way you can connect with individuals on Facebook, you can now connect with celebrities, musicians, politicians and various organizations.  Granted, Facebook is a little behind on both these new features (Twitter has been doing this for ages now), it appears that Facebook is now the one playing catch up.

No one really knows how these new features will be accepted by the general Facebook community (there are several groups which have already sprung up calling for the old homepage to be reinstated).  This can be expected, judging by the response during the last facelift.  Although some of these groups are already 600k member strong – and the update was rolled out only last week.

We at FBReview.com decided to launch a poll to see what you think about the new changes.  Do you like them or dislike them.

[polldaddy poll="1478032"]

Update: April 7, 2009

After running the poll for the last few weeks, we have some preliminary results.  As it stands now it appears DO NOT like the new layout one bit! Only 10 users voted for the new layout while a whopping 116 users say the hate it, and 3 users don’t seem to care either way.  So for now it looks like 90% of you don’t like the new layout, however we’ll keep the poll running a bit longer, maybe some of you will grow to love the new design.  So keep voting and at the end of April we will tally up the final results.

Incentive based advertising is when a developer provides advertising offers to users and in exchange for clicking on the offers the user is rewards with points or virtual cash. For example clicking on a specific offer will give you extra bonus points which you exchange for items or features within the application that would not be available to other users.

Outright feature purchases is when the developer offers the user to buy the virtual points or items outright using a credit card or a PayPal account.

These two monetization aspects raise a very important question. If someone pays for a service, aren’t they entitled to some kind of customer service when something goes wrong?

In the rush to monetize their applications many developers have overlooked this critical point. In most application (most, but not all) developers provide little or no support. Case in point is Zynga who have recieved very negative feedback from their users when they launched their YoCash program. But Zynga is not alone in this aspect, as it appears that most developers are following in the same pattern. Either that, or they have simply been overwhelmed with requests for support that they simply lack the facilities to accommodate all the users. For example take a medium to high usage application with about 3 million monthly active users. Lets assume that only about 5% of those are paying users. That translates to about 150k paying customers, of those about 10% have some kind of issue (whether it is technical or otherwise). That means a developer need to service about 15k requests per month. If the developer is unable to provide support the result is a terrible backlog of customer service requests, and a lot of unhappy customers.

I believe that Facebook must intervene here and ensure that developers provide adequate  customer service facilities.  If developers are taking money from Facebook users, some of the responsibility for customer care falls indirectly on Facebook.  There are many ways to provide cost effective customer service but since developers are not obligated to do so, they simply ignore this all together.  Facebook must realize that it is in its best interest to keep its users happy and that providing customer care facilities should be a requirement to launching an application on Facebook, otherwise alienated users will eventually turn to stand-alone social games with far better customer care then what is provide on Facebook.