1. My Year In Status

My Year In Status has consistently found itself on both our fastest growing and explosive lists over the past month. Use the application to build a collage out of your Facebook updates throughout this past year from their selection of designs. Look back and reminisce at the highs and lows of the year through the eyes of your Facebook statuses and be sure to share your finished collage with friends. Add My Year In Status on Facebook here.

Another popular New Years application that has seen tremendous growth leading up to 2011 is Prosperous New Year To All My Friends. Send gifts and greeting messages from a huge selection with the application, and show your love to those you may not be able to ring in the New Year with. Check back on the application’s page for updates and new additions that may be just right for the person you have in mind. Find your greeting using Properous New Year here.

Facebook is testing out a new “Questions” app, and not while not many details are available about it now, the concept is intriguing – and it’s perhaps a foreshadowing example of how developers should expect to see Facebook testing out more of its own apps this year.

The Questions feature appears above advertising on the right-hand column, and includes links to provide an answer, or ask your question. It also shows you the name of the person who asked a question — presumably a current Facebook friend, or someone in your geographic area, perhaps — with a link to their profile. While Facebook has run various interactive elements in this space before, like “become a fan,” this is the first time it has put direct user-to-user interactions in it. In terms of how the app will function, we’re guessing it will access user profile data about friends to decide which users will see which questions, like what Aardvark does.

The bigger picture, on that point, is that “Questions” appears to be a new communication channel, distinct from the news feed, messages, invites and notifications. It’s not clear what else Facebook might want to do with it. Perhaps we’ll start seeing questions and answers appear as news feed stories, for example, or somehow give third party applications, Pages and Facebook Connect sites access to it for their own questions, asked from their own destinations?

The right-hand column placement also suggests Facebook may want to provide companies and other organizations with access to the service for a fee of some sort. Like Facebook sells “Sponsored Events” as an ad unit, one can easily imagine “Sponsored Questions” going in here. Or, Facebook perhaps thinks Questions is a feature that will get users paying more attention to the right-hand column than they have been, thereby driving up clicks on ads?

All these questions imply that the company will need to carefully control privacy around the feature, as the new channel is an obvious place for inappropriate or sensitive questions and answers, that users probably don’t want to have made widely available.

Facebook’s Blake Ross gave a little more background yesterday on Quora:

Facebook’s experimentation in this “space” is actually a direct result of internal circumstances at the company rather than all this recent outside activity. For the last few years, we didn’t have enough engineers to make significant, sustained investments in our applications (e.g. photos and events). Earlier this year, we finally got comfortable enough with our recruiting numbers to reorganize the product engineering group into dedicated application teams of 4-5 people each. That’s why you’re suddenly seeing improvements to applications that haven’t evolved in years, such as our recent launch of higher res photos. One of our app teams is charged with experimentation and we decided to pursue this vision of real-time Q&A now that the resources were finally in place.

User-generated question and answer services have been around for years. But a couple very interesting ones have launched recently that try to take advantage of social connections to provide better answers. One is Aardvark, real time-driven service that was recently bought by Google. It lets you type simple questions into a variety of interfaces — instant message was the main one — then it sends your question to your friends who had the most relevant interests and expertise. Facebook profile data was a key way that it figured out which person to send which questions to.

A group of former Facebook employees have also recently started a site called Quora, that provides an easy-to-use interface for asking and answering questions. It relies entirely on Facebook for social features; it automatically has you “follow” all of your friends on the service without saying so, for example. By using Facebook, it retains the real-world connections that most people have on the service.

We still don’t have many details on Questions. But we do know one thing: Facebook is investing more in its in-house apps, something we predicted we’d see more of this year just last week.

[Image via All Facebook.]

For those of us you that didn’t get your Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival tickets for this weekend’s uber-concert in southern California, 5 Gum is offering you a way to enjoy the festivities live through your Facebook page. Coachella and the Wrigley brand have teamed up to offer three live streams from the show this weekend, with special behind-the-scenes content and on-demand material appearing May 3.

Company promotions at concerts are nothing new — but social media is, relatively speaking. And as brands have gotten more comfortable marketing on Facebook in the past couple of years, their tie-ins with concert marketing have gotten more ambitious. Levi’s began live-streaming a concert venue at South by Southwest last month — a venue that it had already been involved with for years. Microsoft is planning a big push for summer concert ticket giveaways on Facebook together with Live Nation. Odwalla meanwhile, has its own Facebook promotion already going for Coachella and other festivals this summer.

This latest offering from 5 Gum is being run to promote the company’s release of two new React flavors (Mint and Fruit) and lets fans of the brand create a custom itinerary based on a select list of artists. Fans can preview the artists work through both Facebook and MySpace buttons housed in the application(which was developed by Appssavvy) and piece together their favorite bands from the list to post to their news feeds. The festival will then be streamed live through three different channels, one of which will be in HD, and fans will be able to interact with each other during the concerts through Twitter and a real-time chat function built into the site.

The Coachella festival has become one of the larger music events of the summer concert schedule, and this year’s lineup features everyone from big names like Jay-Z and the Gorillaz to up-and-coming indie bands, as well as a much-anticipated reunion from alternative rock pioneers Pavement. The $270-plus 3-day passes sold out long ago, with prices for tickets on sites like Stub Hub reaching as high as $4000 right now. So the Facebook application could gain more prominence as a way to give every Facebook user a chance to join in the festivities.

There are currently a little more than 40 artists listed in the Coachella application, but artists are being added and updated as this weekend’s festival approaches. Once you’ve entered all the bands you’d like to check out, you can go back to watch the groups through the live streams. And there will still be plenty of content available even after the last band has played — 5 Gum will be posting exclusive content on their Facebook fan page, including interviews, backstage footage, on-demand performances and complimentary downloads starting May 3.

Adapted: insidefacebook

A new iPhone app allows you to record voice messages and post them directly to your Facebook profile. Called FaceMic, this new app takes advantage of the nifty new features of the iPhone OS 3.0 and provides a way for you to post updates, podcasts and other audio to your Facebook news feed. Just as with videos shared on your Facebook profile, the FacMic audio will play directly from your newsfeed.

Once you download the app to your iPhone (it costs 99 cents), there’s no registration necessary. FaceMic is integrated with Facebook Connect, so you can use your Facebook credentials to login. From there, you can pull up the app anytime, and start recording. Once you’re satisfied with the audio message, hit publish and it will appear on your Facebook profile.

From the looks of it, the app works pretty well. I tried it on my iPod touch and didn’t have any problems using the app. As a blogger I see value in app like this for interview or podcasting purposes, as it allows me to capture recordings on-demand. The limitations of the app, including the lack of video or photo support, are easily overlooked because of the simplicity and usability of this application. It serves its purpose and can be of use to a fairly wide range of users.

FaceMic is among those iPhone applications that makes mobile updating a mindless task, giving you the mobile access you need. What FaceMic also does is provide another way in which Facebook can compete with Twitter, from a multimedia update perspective. As others, like 12seconds, integrate with multiple platforms including Twitter and TweetDeck, and also have photo support, I do see some areas in which FaceMic could improve.

On the upside, the makers of FaceMic do have an application that’s specific to Twitter, called TweetMic. It would be nice if a single recording from one app could be published across both networks, especially as the overlap between Facebook and Twitter users widens every day.
Aside from blogging/podcasting purposes, what other ways would you use FaceMic?