nonsmokingarea.com

fbCal is a godsend for those who tend to forget birthdays (like me) and rarely log into Facebook anymore (like me) [even when I did, I never really noticed the upcoming birthdays on the homepage anyway]. fbCal (a Facebook-app) generates RSS-/iCalendar-feeds for your friends’ birthdays & your upcoming events on FB, which you then can pipe into Google Calendar, iCal etc. but don’t cry if you still forget your best friends birthday, maybe he/she hasn’t made this data available to you on FB at all…

no way you haven’t heard about this yet… …coverage worth reading:

• Marc Canter - Open Social compatibility: social networks and applications vendors working together
• Marc Andreessen - Report from the front: Tonight’s launch of Open Social (Ning is supporting OpenSocial as well, examples here)
• John  Battelle - MySpace Tosses in With Google

• FaceReviews’ Rodney Rumford reviewed my Gaping Void-app (which already has more than 1.400 users, cool!). I totally agree with his suggestions on how-to improve the app (after all this was a very quick shot and my first attempt on F8). hold tight for a 2.0-relaunch in October, and thx a lot for the review!

• Presentations is the latest addition to Google’s web-office suite. as Docs & Spreadsheets, the new offering is slim on functionality but shines with collaboration-features (see TechCrunch for screenshots & more).
• write-ups of the first day at TechCrunch40: TechCrunch, Read/Write-Web pt 1. & pt. 2
• this Thursday in Vienna: the first installment of “Open Coffee Club Vienna” - a regular (?) hang-out & co-working-space for web-workers @ Ronahi. I’m going to miss out this week, but hope this is going to be regular…

• A VC: Biz Stone on Read/Write Talk -
• MySpace: How To Devalue a Platform in Three Easy Steps - SWiK -
• Going Viral like the Common Cold (Not Always a Good Thing) -
• MMOGCHART.COM -
• GigaOM A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi « -
• Retro MacOS Theme -

back from holiday (sort of), I’ve been toying with the Facebook-API and built my first tiny little application today. it simply fetches Hugh MacLeod’s latest cartoon from gapingvoid.com and renders it on your profile.

if you want to install Gaping Void to your profile, the application-link is apps.facebook.com/gapingvoid - enojy!

• Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities -
• DVD Reviewer - Multi-Region Hacks - Harman/Kardon DVD 27 -
• Facebook News Feed RSS– Nemik’s Blog -
• WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist - Download Squad -
• blog optimization @ Scatterings -
• Wordpress tips and tricks - custom login page » Binary Moon » The home of Ben Gillbanks -

• 5 Facebook Application Gotchas | 20bits
• Facebook Developers | Resources
• Facebook Developers | Documentation
• Facebook Developers | FAQ
• Facebook Developers | Resources
• Spock
• Welcome to Scrybe
• Facebook Application Development - First Steps

seems like there’s currently at least one appealing Facebook-application to install each day (if you are willing to donate that much time, that is). the accurately titled ‘Books’ (found at Guy Kawasaki’s blog) shares your current, previous and future reading-list with your Facebook-friends. the app is tied to Amazon’s catalog and works quite nice, the only feature I’m missing are automatic recommendations based on your friend’s reading-lists (they should just add a “Books I should read”-tab for that).

Books is available for installation right here…if you’re in my network you probably already have received an invitation…

so what’s your favorite Facebook-application? (besides the obvious ones, like Twitter, Flickr etc.)

update: ‘Books’ seems to search the american Amazon-index only, so I wasn’t able to add this one. interestingly, the ‘Buy’-Link doesn’ lead to Amazon, but Barnes and Nobles instead