According to Nielsen, users of the social networking website Facebook spent over 82% more time on Facebook in 2009 than they did in 2008 Furthermore, the average amount of time spent on Facebook by each user is six hours per month.

This article reviews the top five Facebook Applications.

Facebook Desktop Utility – Chit Chat for Facebook

The Facebook Messenger, Chit Chat for Facebook, makes it possible to use Facebook Chat from your desktop. As a result, you can access Facebook Chat much like you would AIM or Windows Live Messenger (MSN) on your computer.

This Facebook application provides a variety of benefits over using Facebook Chat from your web-browser. Chit Chat for Facebook allows you to save your chat history, receive sign in alerts and you can even format your instant messages.

Facebook Game - Games By Mesmo.TV

Despite there being a lot of seriously bad games released as Facebook Applications, Mesmo have actually managed to create a Facebook Game that is genuinely fun and doesn’t just try to get you to send a lot of invite spam.

The Facebook Applications is broadly titled “Games” revealing to new users that isn’t actually a single game but compendium of Games. My favorite games on this Facebook Application were Crazy Tax, Space Invaders and Pacman.

Crazy Tax is a game whereby you race a taxi cab for extra time earning points, however there is traffic in the road that acting as moving obstacles that you have to both steer around and jump over in order to get to the next level.

Pacman is essentially very similar to the classic game, although, it’s been spiced up a little bit in this Facebook application presumably to avoid copyright issues – for example, the maps are different and so are the ghosts.

Facebook Game Space invaders, is pretty similar to the classic game, essentially you have a space craft that you use to shoot alien spacecraft. There are two basic differences between this Facebook application and the original. Firstly, the alien spacecraft genuinely look awesome on this Facebook application. Secondly, if you shoot the alien mother space craft that flies past every now and again you can collect a passage gives your spacecraft special powers.

Whilst I’ve only mentioned three games, Mesmo actually provides 72, yes - seventy one Facebook games on its Facebook Application “Games.”

Space Invaders on Mesmo’s “Games” Facebook Application

Facebook Utility - Webmessage- free SMS

Let’s set the scene. You are out of credit but you must urgently reply to your girlfriend’s text message.

Thankfully, and conveniently, from your Facebook account you can now send free SMS – worldwide. I particularly, liked the phone book that the application provides.

One criticism I have of this Facebook Application is that I didn’t like the use of the use of free SMS incentives to get people to sign up to websites that were irrelevant to the application.

Facebook Game - Word Challenge

Word Challenge is a game whereby you make as many words as possible out of the letters provided. To be honest despite being very engaging, it really tested me. If you have a spare few minutes it may be worth checking out this Facebook Application. The artwork in this Facebook application is tip top! In your Word Challenges, don’t forget your plurals!

Facebook Game - Sport Citizen

If you’re one of those people that like Sports trivia then you’re going to love Sport Citizen.

The Facebook Game, Sport Citizen tests you knowledge on a wide range of sporting subject matter – from entire categories to selected teams. Whilst Sport Citizen had questions for Football, Cricket, Rugby, NHL, Formula 1 and the Olympics there were plenty of other sports for which Sport Citizen had questions.

TwitCause, the brainchild of Experience Project, is a concept that builds on the idea that people are more willing to spread the word about good causes. You begin by following TwitCause on Twitter, and each Thursday they choose a new cause to tweet about. The included link sends you to a page where you can donate to the cause via PayPal, or you can choose to help by simply pressing the Retweet button and educating your followers.

Additionally, people can nominate the charities that they think should be supported by TwitCause, which then get voted on to be next up. TwitCause is hoping to get more businesses and brands involved by sponsoring matching donations, or having people tweet in order to get the brands to make donations.

In a recent guest post on Beth Kanter’s blog, Julio Vasconcellos, who manages TwitCause for Experience Project, wrote that it’s difficult to fundraise via individual donations. People are less likely to open up their wallets than they are to help spread a message to the people in their network.

In my opinion, it’s the latter concept that is most sustainable, and recently it’s looked like corporations and brands are beginning to take that stance as well. In my own recent experience with Home Depot, I had initially asked if they’d be interested in matching whatever I raised for the New Orleans rebuilding organization LowerNine.org. They generously surprised me by coming back with an offer of a $10,000 donation of gift cards from their Home Depot Foundation, arming the organization with the tools and supplies they needed most to get their work done.

You’ll find Pepsi following suit with their Refresh Everything contest, while Chase Bank just wrapped up a contest where people voted on which charitable organizations they wanted to win cash. Perhaps this is the next phase in the evolution of TwitCause?

Have you had an experience with TwitCause or using Twitter as a tool for raising awareness? I’m interested to hear about it in the comments.

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With the revitalization of the inner cities and old buildings as ” industrial lofts”, the green movement, and the economy and the slow economic recovery of late, the timing for SPAGG.com is prefect:

Spagg.com Network – the first place where private owners can securely rent their cars to make extra money.  Owners and renters meet for pickup and drop off – it is perfect.  It cuts out the middlemen completely, and utilizing today’s social network technology and mobile access to the best advantage of car owners who need to offset costs, the environment we all live in, the reduction of congestion and parking issues, the reduction of dependence on foreign oil: everybody wins on this one!

Why Use Spagg?

• Prices other car renters can’t beat
• Environment: improve car usage efficiency
• Give your business to the community

How Does Spagg Work?

• You pick location, date and car
• Spagg matches you with a car owner
• We arrange a convenient pickup site
• Spagg helps you with insurance and payments

Why Is Spagg Safe?

• Vehicles in safe operating condition
• Users fully identified
• All rentals have property and 3rd party liability coverage

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My very first blog, Life is Marketing, was a Blogger blog, but I had to wonder how Blogger was faring in an era of microblogging (like Twitter), location-based services (like FourSquare) and mini-blog services (like Posterous and Tumblr). And since Rick works for Google, I had to ask him exactly where Google Wave is going to take us. Take a look:

I was a bit surprised that Blogger is doing so well, but Rick wasn’t the only one to indicate that blogging generally is not suffering from any sort of fall-off.  Richard Jalichandra, the CEO of Technorati, shared a number of stats that aligned with Rick’s in terms of blog use increasing. And I admire the overall plan to release Google Wave and let the world take it and use it as they will.

And you? Still blogging, or have you switched to mini-blogging? Or are you one of those folks I’m seeing who tried that and are back to regular blogging?

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I am not the only one to notice this; Android developers are also complaining about it, the developers are complaining about this as well in an article from GigaOm.

The low download volumes and lack of profits speak to the fact that app discovery isn’t easy in the Android Marketplace. Having used Android Marketplace for many months now, I have to say the experience is sub-par. Eighty-two percent of those surveyed felt that the Android Marketplace’s design makes it difficult for apps to be noticed. As I pointed out earlier, special marketplaces being set up by phone companies is only going to muddy the waters. Source:GigaOm

The only problem with the GigaOm article is that they quote a 30 respondent questionnaire, and other article shows that there are a huge number of projects ramping up to take advantage of the app store. Unfortunately though, this is the current landing page for the Android Market Place.

That isn’t going to work, especially if you want to browse and see what Android offers before you go splurge a few hundred dollars on a device. 20K apps is ok, but if you can’t see them, you can’t download them, and consumers will wonder what they bought.

Surprisingly this is a Google effort that looks like it needs some serious work. Normally when dealing with any Google system even in Beta there is a certain amount of polish. Even Google Wave had polish if it was confusing and painful to use. Realistically, and this is where Apple tends to get it right, the User Interface is huge, and while it might look good from the Google Phone of choice, from a web visitor viewpoint the web site is just plain old sad. Apple at least lets you tool around the App Store, although with the hundreds of thousands of apps they have navigating them might be difficult, it is not as difficult as the Google Android Store.

Seriously – Google needs to get this one together and make it easy to search, find, purchase, and all from the web.

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