Facebook just helped me recently. I managed to wish someone a Happy Birthday on time, because Facebook tells me whose birthday is coming recently. Doesn’t this remind you of something? In the past few years, we have received nagging invites from our friends who wants us to key our details inside their Birthday Alarm account at some website so that when our birthday comes near, they will know. I don’t know what happened to that website, but Facebook has now succeeded in doing the same thing, with less irritation.

There are many different sites which are doing different things, but mostly simple mundane issues, something you don’t need an account for. Facebook is best in such a sense because you need 1 account (facebook), and then you can have access to many applications which are doing the same thing that other sites are allowing you to do.

This also means that if you are coming up with a website, you better think twice now. Some things will be more successful having a website of your own, some will be more successful being hosted on Facebook. Facebook has effectively eliminated the need for birthday reminder websites, or groups websites like Yahoo groups. Facebook also has an event application by default, which people can invite you for an event and you can just click Not Attending, Maybe Attending, or Attending. Saves the trouble and you don’t need another application for that.

The huge numbers of Facebook users just mean that most of our friends are now on Facebook, or will sooner or later be members of Facebook. The ease of applications installation simply means that Facebook is easily customizable and is a perfect substitute for many online applications.

If you are a business owner, why not think Facebook? Perhaps you will find a good way to market your brand on Facebook, perhaps you will not. Because some applications are perfect for facebook, whist others are not. Some stuff are still worth getting an account for.

Facebook is the popular social networking site online today and it wins Friendster hands down anytime. Friendster’s popularity took such a hit that it has resorted to copying one major component of Facebook - the applications idea.

There are tons of applications on Facebook. Useful applications like Event Management, or the Wall application, which allows you to post a comment on another user’s facebook profile. Facebook is also host to many games like BattleStations or Warbook, two of the more famous games so far. There are even games like FluffFriends, where you adopt a pet and you feed it things so they can race faster, and you compete with your friends.

Applications face stiff competition from other applications. They have to fight each other for traffic, so that they can earn more money through the ads served on their pages. However, there is one type of application I think is the worst, and only fools will use them to generate revenue.

The worst kind of application on Facebook is quizes. There are so many quizes applications on Facebook, and you have to add all of them separately to do them, not that they are accurate anyway. They clutter up your facebook profile, and you either relegate it to the Extended Profile section (where it is hidden), or you delete them after you have done. Of the quizes, the worst kinds are those that force you to invite your friends before you can get your results. Those are trashed by me immediately because it would involve spamming my friends and I have no idea whether there would really be a quiz there or not.

Let’s see why they are fools to think they can generate revenue on Facebook using quizes:

Firstly, most of the time, quizes are only accessed once in the user’s life, and nobody will go to the quiz page anymore if the questions do not change. If nobody is accessing, it would mean no one is looking at the ads, and also, the number of unique visitors drops. In a graphical sense, it is like an equation involving an exponential to a variable of -t, where t is time. Visitors tend to 0 after some time, and it is not long enough to get advertisers interested.

Secondly, they pissed the hell out of the users. It is extremely irritating to begin a quiz needing to invite many people at the start. It is worst, when you invite the many people and you don’t see the supposed results (the quiz, in this instance).

Lastly, quizes are boring. They don’t attract as many people as games do, because after you do a certain number of quizes, you get sick of doing quizes, and you know that the standard of quizes on Facebook is lousy, done up by some weird geek with a computer, and not really planned well.

I went to watch the “webcast” of the Singapore PHP User group, on a topic about suitable apps design for social network. I think it is a great clip to see if you are interested in programming an application for facebook. Before you start, however, promise me to do up useful applications, not quizzes. You want people coming back, not vowing never to come back.

For the Singapore PHP User group video, click here.