Facebook for advanced users
Facebook has quickly developed into a hugely popular networking site. It offers many options, but there are lots of applications that can extend its possibilities further. Here are a couple of useful ones.
Although Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) isn’t really useful, professionally speaking, it’s a great community for developing your private network. By installing so-called “apps”, you can add a number of useful functions to Facebook. You’ll find a list of such apps in the Application Directory (http://www.facebook.com/apps/), but many of them don’t amount to much. That’s why Select Sources (http://www.selectcourses.com/blog/2009/100-awesome-facebook-apps-for-productivity-and-learning/) has made a selection of good applications that can really “boost your productivity”. We put two of them to the test.
Photo Finder
Looking for photos? One of the latest apps for Facebook is Photo Finder (http://www.face.com). This tool analyses photos of yourself and your contacts and suggests tags for the faces it recognises. This is convenient for discovering photos of friends in other people’s galleries. Or to find out whether any photos of yourself are circulating on Facebook without your knowing it... The application sends you a notification whenever photos appear on Facebook showing your own or your friends’ faces, but you can disable this function. Tip. You can also compile a list of persons to be monitored (for instance, yourself only).
How does it work? Photo Finder is currently in the test phase, but on the website you can sign up as a “tester”. Note. We had to wait for one week before receiving our invitation by e-mail. As soon as you’ve received this invitation, copy the link it contains to your browser (clicking on it didn’t work). The app will then be loaded automatically (this may take a while), and you will gradually see photos of your contacts appear. However, you should click on Get started at the bottom first, only then will Photo Finder really start searching for photographs. Again, this may take a while (also depending on the number of friends you have), so you’re advised to “come back later” to inspect the results.
The result? In our test, the first analysis took some 25 minutes for about 90 friends. Once this is done, you can enter your own name or that of your Facebook friends in the search field. The underlying face-recognition technology turned out to work amazingly well during our tests: Photo Finder retrieved dozens of photos from our network of contacts, suggesting the correct name in most cases.
Note. After installation, you can access this application at any moment via http://apps.facebook.com/photo-finder/.
Documents
Sharing documents. Remember Zoho (http://www.zoho.com), the online alternative for Office software? You can also use this handy service as an application within Facebook, more in particular via http://apps.facebook.com/zohoapp/. Just log in using your Zoho account (or create a new account) and you can get started. For instance, it enables you to create or import a document in Zoho Writer, a spreadsheet in Zoho Sheet or a presentation in Zoho Show within Facebook.
Tip. It’s even possible to upload existing Word, Excel or PowerPoint files to the application. These files will be converted into the Zoho format automatically, so that they can be used in Facebook. A click on the Invite your friends button lets you invite other people to view or edit them.
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