web stuff 4 writers

In Friday’s entry, I wrote about how writers could use the basic features of facebook.com – the groups, event calendars, and profile fields that become available to them as soon as they become a member of this social networking website.

However, there’s more to facebook than these basic tools. Earlier this year, the owners of facebook began to allow external organisations and web developers to create their own applications.

There are hundreds of these applications now available: from maps applications which show all the cities you’ve visited to vampire/werewolf applications which allow you to virtually bite your friends and have them join your monster army. Here are a few of these applications which as, a writer, you might find fun or useful.

Blog RSS Feed Reader

This application uses your blog’s RSS feed to display the titles of your recent entries within your facebook profile. Profile visitors can click through to your website to read the full text, or subscribe to the feed directly from facebook.

Books

As a writer, I’m also a reader – and the Books application allows you to share your opinions on the books you’ve read (as well as keeping track of any comments that facebook readers have left about your own). The book information is generally taken from Amazon, but if the book you’ve read doesn’t appear there, you can add it most of it yourself.

There are a number of different versions of this application. At the moment, I’m using the one coded by Larry Gadea and Martin Mroz.

Storylines

This is a shared story application. You write the first 200 characters of a story, then invite your friends to add their 200 characters and see where the narrative goes. This one was a bit buggy when I first installed it, and I couldn’t see new additions to my stories for days at a time. However it seems to be working fine now.

Scrabulous

Scrabulous is a online version of my favourite word game. You can challenge up to four friends to a match, with each player taking their turn when they’re logged into facebook.

How to add applications to your facebook profile

1. If you want to add the specific applications I’ve mentioned here, you can search for them by their name. Alternatively you can browse applications by keyword.
2. Clicking on the name of the application in the resulting list will usually take you to a page with general information about the application. Click on ‘Add Application’ to add it to your profile.
3. The application may need some extra information from you in order to display correctly. Once you’ve filled in all the details, the application will appear as a box on your facebook profile.

Your thoughts

If you’ve got a facebook profile, do you use any applications to help promote your book? Or are there any writing-related games you play via this social networking website? Leave a comment and let us know.

Tags: Procrastination, Promotion //