Top 5 Facebook Apps That You Haven't Tried Yet

Let's face it, you spend most of your day on Facebook, updating your status, commenting on friends walls, and playing with the thousands of apps available. We are all familiar with some of the top apps like Farmville and Mafia Wars, but here we look at the Top 5 Facebook Applications that you haven't tried yet. 

1. Mingleverse Easily the coolest new app on Facebook that is completely under the radar. The Mingleverse application brings live 3D voice chat to Facebook. The app gives you a virtual room (like a beach house, or a basketball court) and you can instantly invite your online friends into your room. Each person appears as a customizable avatar that can walk around the room and talk using text chat or use your voice with the 3D voice chat plug-in. The best part of the app is the media sharing features. There is a video screen in the room where you can watch YouTube videos together, show off your pictures, go live on your webcam, or watch TV together through Justin.tv - it's really like having someone over in your living room. 

2. Honesty Box Honestly Box is a simple application gaining in popularity and is not for the faint-of heart. Honesty Box, as the name suggests, lets your friends tell you what they really think. Pose a question on your profile and your friends can reply anonymously. Yes, that's right anonymously, so don't be surprised to find a few unpleasantries. 

3. Weekly Schedule Facebook may have made us more social people, but there is no denying it has taken away from actual face time. Weekly Schedule allows you to post a graphical display of your weekly activities for all your friends to see, making it easy to know when you're available to get together. See that your friend has class from 1-2pm on Tuesday? Then you know she's available for a coffee afterward! 

4. QOOP Facebook is now the largest image storing site on the internet and QOOP's Photo Store allows you to turn your Facebook photos into printed products like photo books, prints, posters, postcards, shirts, and more. Then, after you purchase an order, you can share it with your friends so they can order a copy for themselves. Just remember that Facebook compresses your images, so you won't want to print anything larger than say a 4x6. 5.Caption.iT With the Caption.iT App you can personalize your photos or other neat images. From your profile your friends can make them for you or you can send them to your friends. Write a message in the sand, with lipstick on a mirror or on your favorite photos!

4 Step Guide to Meeting Women

With all the social media sites out there, one has taken the world by storm: Facebook. And it only comes naturally that guys will want to leverage this new tool to meet women. It's not too hard to meet women on Facebook, but you have to do it with some understanding of how to play the game. Because there are many ways to do it wrong, and only a few to do it right... I've been eyeing this method to meeting women for some time, and I agree completely. It IS a mega-mega opportunity to meet women... ...if it's handled right. First of all, let's remember the catastrophe that is "MySpace." (May it rest in peace.) That social network has been so polluted and abused that it's really not useful anymore. I know I don't take it seriously. 

What happened there? Well, first of all, everyone got slammed with spam. A few clever programmers and bulk friend programs, and suddenly you had MySpace pages that looked like web sites from the year 1998. Cheap backgrounds, silly wallpaper, and everybody's page looked like a 14-year-old girl's bedroom, complete with Britney Spears posters. Enter Facebook. A whole lot classier than its trailer-park cousin, Facebook has maintained a better image. But with a bunch of cool toys and add-ons that made it interesting and more fun. 

So how can you work this great social networking tool to help you with your dating life - while not looking like some pervert who got kicked out of the alleys of MySpace? I'll give you a very simple 4-step model to use. This is the one that my friends and I have used consistently to get results online.

1: Connect with the guys - and other women - who have a lot of cute girl friends. In other words, connect with people that YOU are not interested in dating who have big networks. You must be very indirect at first using Facebook. Remember the lesson from MySpace - Don't be a spammer! This is not "match.com" or an online dating site, so don't just start sending out invites and emails hoping to score based on numbers. We've come to hate the abusers, and you'll just get your sorry ass kicked right off. Start out with light connections. Think "friends first." Don't make your Facebook profile look like you're trying to meet women. Be subtle. What you're trying to do is multiply your results and increase your connection potential by meeting more people who know more people. If you just start trying to hit on the women you're interested in right off the bat, you'll be limiting your results with shortsighted thinking. Think out to the LONG term. The more cool people you connect with and forge relationships with, the more likely you are to connect with a woman naturally. 

2: Connect with women you are interested in VERY indirectly. What you have to do is send a simple friend request - and make sure you include a message with it! You just say something like, "Hey, I saw we're both friends with Greg... Then I noticed you're a snowboarder, too... Ever go to Tahoe?" You see what I did there? I left a question INSIDE my friend request. For her to answer it, she's going to feel compelled to add me. It's also just something people are looking to do. Let's face it, we all measure our social success by how many people we've got as friends on Facebook. We all want a HUGE network, so women will WANT to add you - if only to increase their friend count. 

3: Start leveraging the tools. Facebook has a huge amount of potential for the guy who wants to take advantage of them. You can add all kinds of cute little applications to send virtual drinks to friends, send goofy gifts, or even start your own polls and surveys. But one of the best tools you need to be using is the GROUP function on Facebook. In fact, in preparing for this article, I created a group to start connecting you guys together and enabling men to share information. You can do this, too. Just create a group based on your passion and your local area. I'm going to advise you to avoid starting a group based on "Warcraft" or on the latest hot actress. Make your group something a woman can relate to and might be interested in. Maybe it's the television show "Lost..." or maybe it's about all things Italian. Ba-da-bing! Now you've got a hook to use to invite her into your group. 

4: Start escalating and creating more opportunities. Remember, this is a VIRTUAL tool. It's online. In other words, your connections don't REALLY exist anywhere except on some server in an air-conditioned room in a data center somewhere. It's up to YOU to bring these connections to life with events that you can invite people to. Most people will stroll around this virtual network, but then never take it into the REAL world. That's where YOU come in. Maybe once a month you should organize a happy hour at your local favorite bar. Or maybe you make a Facebook group for wine tasters, and then every other Friday you meet up and go tasting the latest Pinot Noirs. 

THAT is your opportunity to start looking for romantic potential in the groups. You have to remember that you can't be a Facebook "pickup artist" and try to attract women online. You have to build a network, forge some connections, and meet women in person to start creating the attraction. That being said, you can also send out some playful introductions to women you don't know and see if they bite. (Just make sure your profile has enough interesting bait for them to nibble at...) - Write on people's walls... - Send a few virtual drinks... - Send some good karma... - Use the "Flirtable" app... For the man with initiative, the Facebook world is yours. So step up and start creating the social network, then start meeting the women in it.

Words, Grammar & Punctuation

There, their and they're are not interchangeable. More often than not when I read a message on Facebook, there's a word misused and then another person attempts to correct it. Usually the word is corrected wrong, too. In high school, my English teacher shared a wall poster created by one of the upper classmate for a school event. The poster read, "Their is a program after school for the handicapped. 

There needs will be discussed and donations taken for they're athletic equipment. If you can help, bring contributions to the auditorium." In a red felt tip marker, a student had crossed out the first "their" and scrawled in "they're." The class got a good laugh, and the instructor laughed with us, then asked us to write a response to the posted, using all three words correctly. In third grade, my grandparents had played "their" game with me and taught me the difference between, they're, their and there. 

I spent the better part of the next thirty minutes sharing the difference between the three words, and correcting the poster. There now... There, refers to a place, explained and identified by the 'e' on the end of the word, matching the 'e' on the end of the word place. You can't forget that over there is a place and there is an 'e' on the end of there and place. Their, the possessive form of the word contains the letter 'i' thereby identifying the word as personal, as in belongs to them. 

Theirs. Anytime the word their has an 'i' in it, it becomes a possessive form of the word as in their house, their car, their clothes. Personal is therefore possessive and includes the letter 'i'. They're is a contraction. A blend of two words they and are, allowing for the softening of the language and the slur of the words, removing the 'a' from are and adding an accent to blend the two and become they're. The word is used to describe who they are, what they're doing, and how they're behaving in the common gist of conversation. They're my three favorite words to confuse and explain.

Three Steps to Effective Follow-Through in Social Marketing

It's one thing to have an active social network account with scores of fans and followers, and another to regularly provide information and incentives to keep people interested. Unless you monitor your profiles for feedback and follow up on concerns and questions, however, you will soon discover these online hubs become stale and provide nothing more than another source for inbound linking. Management of social networking page is not unlike tending a garden - your attentiveness and care fosters growth, and like the bees that collect pollen to spread to corners you may not notice people will assist in your account's popularity if they feel it's worth promoting. 

It goes without saying, then, that you (or whomever is in charge of your social marketing) remains on top of monitoring your accounts. The longer it appears your pages and statuses are neglected, the worse it looks for your company, and it may allow competitors or spammers to overtake your space. Follow-up on feedback, and follow through on social promotions. Here are just a few ways to achieve this level of dependability. 

Respond/Reply: If somebody posts a question on your Facebook wall, answer it. If somebody plugs your Twitter account during a #followfriday spree, acknowledge it, and thank YouTube members who compliment your videos. Even if a fan makes a general comment, or promotes something unrelated to your company on the fan wall (it will happen, but do not chide the poster and risk alienation), don't let the opportunity pass without at the very least clicking the "like" button. Make your social presence conversational, and monitored the comment threads created. 

Give Users Alternatives: Are you set up on UrbanSpoon, ePinions, or Yelp, or a relative review network? Take a moment to mine good reviews and brag about them on Twitter and Facebook. The promotion you give helps others know you're found elsewhere and may encourage them to click through and add their own experiences. Reward Good Mojo: If you notice a day or week where fan participation is quite active, show them you're listening. 

Offer a contest or deep discount, a freebie related to your business. When you've hit a point that people will check out your social profiles because they want to, and not necessarily because they're looking for incentive, giving them a nice surprise is one way to foster that good feeling. If you promise customers and clients the moon via social media, don't wait until the evening hours to make good. Nurturing your presence is a job meant for any hour of the day, nothing is simpler than clicking a response window to say thanks.