OK, the TechCrunch interns tell us about their top 10 favorite Facebook applications. Now, since the interns are 20-somethings I expected that I’d have a different take on what we needed and so I talked through it on my Kyte.tv channel.

Here’s the TechCrunch Intern’s apps:

1. iLike (music app).
2. Graffiti (way to draw little lame cartoons on your Facebook profile).
3. Where I’ve Been (a way to brag to your friends that you’ve been to more countries than they have).
4. Zoho Online Office (a way to share Zoho’s apps with your friends).
5. Fantasy Stock Exchange (fun game, I wonder which stocks they are picking).
6. Flickr Photos.
7. Honesty Box. (A way to send anonymous messages. I already have comments on my blog for that reason.)
8. Box.net files. Useful way to share files.
9. Superpoke. A serious 40 something wouldn’t be caught dead pinching, hugging, tickling his friends.
10. Friend match. 40 somethings don’t need more friends.
11. Bonus: TechCrunch.

My favorite Facebook apps:

1. Google Reader Shared Items. This is way more useful for those who read a lot of feeds. Plus it shows you who has the most popular blog posts in the past few hours.
2. Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku apps. Pick the one you’re on. That lets your Facebook readers keep up with you, no matter where you post.
3. The video application. Lets you send video messages to all your friends from your computer’s webcam.
4. Kyte.tv. You see it here on this post (if you’re reading on my blog — lots of feed readers strip it out). But you also see the same thing on Facebook. You can chat with people live there on that app too.
5. BlogTips. If you’re looking to blog better, use this app.
6. Upcoming Calendar app. Come on, don’t 20-somethings have to keep track of all the events that are coming their way?
7. Blog Friends. Don’t the interns have any friends with blogs? This is how you track them.
8. Wordpress. If you blog on Wordpress or Wordpress.com, this is the app for you. Shows your posts AND your comments. I thought every 20-something had a Wordpress blog?
9. Ustream.tv. This isn’t important to everyone (who here other than Chris Pirillo has a streaming video show). But I included it here cause I have to wonder about a 20 something who isn’t into streaming video. Don’t you guys watch Justin.tv?
10. SkypeMe. Lets you use Skype to call me.
11. FaceReviews. It’s a Website that reviews Facebook applications.
12. iLike. Hey, at least we matched up on that one and the Zoho one (although I don’t have any Zoho stuff I want to share publicly yet).

What do you think? Which Facebook apps are you using, if you’re on Facebook?

I don’t add any of the silly ones, so don’t tell me about the Ninja app or anything like that.

For those of you who haven’t yet added me as a friend on Facebook you probably didn’t notice that I’m now using Upcoming.org as my social calendar. There’s a Facebook application which shows all my Facebook friends my calendar and where I’ll be. Oh, and we’re going to Portland this week. Search Upcoming.org for “Portland, Oregon” and you’ll find out there’s a Blogger Dinner on Thursday night. I’ll be there.

Of course, if you were a friend of mine on Facebook (I add everyone who asks) then you could see my entire calendar, just visit my profile page. Upcoming is a wonderful service.

So is Eventful, by the way. But I can’t find a Facebook application that’ll use Eventful, so Upcoming.org (owned by Yahoo) it is.

Now do you understand why every startup and Web service is struggling to get a Facebook strategy? I will support those startups that make my Facebook profile page better and more useful.

UPDATE: Not yet on TechCrunch (as of 10:13 p.m.)! Damn, it’s not often that I scoop Mike Arrington by more than an hour on an important Web product launch! Hi Mike! :-) Heck, as of 10:48 p.m. it’s not up on Om Malik’s site, either.

I really want to love the new Plaxo. The 18-minute demo I got last week is awesome — see it embedded above. They’ve completely rebuilt the system from scratch and removed the reliance on Outlook and the negative “send spam to your friends” kind of stuff.

UPDATE: Here’s an interview I did with the chief platform architect and VP of marketing of Plaxo and here’s the demo video which shows us what’s cool and new about the new Plaxo.

It’s now a Web service. In fact you can use Plaxo without loading any software. All to manage your contacts. For someone like me that still has most of my contacts in Outlook the new Plaxo is a godsend. It lets me move my contacts, my calendar data, and other things out of Outlook and onto other platforms.

You can move things over to Google, AIM, Yahoo, the Mac’s iCal, and a variety of other applications and cell phones.

It is really awesome.

Now comes the “but.”

In my tests today it was way too slow. It’s not synching reliably with my Outlook 2007 running on Parallels on the Mac. Had to drop back to XP and Office 2003 to get it to work right. Even then it took hours to sync up my stuff and I only have 378 contacts in Outlook and a moderately complex calendar.

Also, I just checked my Gmail account and it didn’t synch those yet. Gotta go and figure that out.

On the other hand it now is encroaching on social networking apps like LinkedIn and Facebook. If they can get it all to work (and get filters for my cell phones and LinkedIn and Facebook itself) then it’d be great. UPDATE: the new Plaxo 3.0 already hooks up to LinkedIn, can someone try that and report on how it works?

Speaking of filters. When you log into the new Plaxo it doesn’t yet hook up with anything. You have to tell it how to hook up with things like Outlook and Gmail.

This will be MUCH clearer after you see the demo video. It really is pretty brilliant design for adding on new functionality. It’s just that there’s a lot missing that we need to really give the new Plaxo a five star review.

You’ll want to use this, though. When it works it’s the best way to manage your contacts.

If you try it out, what do you think?

UPDATE: Plaxo competitor LinkedIn today let leak that they are thinking of opening its platform up to developers. That’s a smart way to keep people on LinkedIn.

UPDATE2: there are several other articles about Plaxo 3.0 already up on TechMeme and I’ll put the best ones, as usual, on my link blog as well.

UPDATE3: If you try out the new Plaxo, make sure to add me as a contact and see if it brings down all my info. My email is robertscoble@hotmail.com

If you haven’t been reading my link blog you’ve been missing some really great blogging. Here’s some highlights.

Ryan Stewart wrote a great post on how and when of Adobe and Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application technologies.
TechCrunch announces Kyte, new video distribution network.
Podcasting News discusses a new report that shows media player owners are listening to less radio.
Coding Horror asks what is our responsibility during the current dotcom bubble?
Lifehacker links to OpenDNS feature that lets you browse the Web with keyboard shortcuts.
Stan Schroeder links to Chris Pirillo who exposes a security issue with Web calendars, particularly Google Calendar. Are you exposing your passwords without thinking about it?
Steve Makofsky says Microsoft’s Silverlight isn’t giving his Mac any love so he’s going to stay away from it.

That’s only a small portion of the cool stuff that I’ve shared on my link blog. Most of which is not available on either Digg or TechMeme.

Oh, and if you only want the headlines, NateTrue put my link blog on Twitter, so you can friend that account and see my link blog items come into your Twitter account.

For the past six months I’ve been reading about 30,000 items a month and sharing somewhere around 1,600 items.

Ahh, nothing like the sound of shipping software on a Sunday evening. Adobe just turned on its servers to get the Apollo alpha software (Ryan Stewart has the scoop). For developers only. And even then I’d only go toward this stuff if you’re an early adopter who needs to be up to date on the latest stuff.

What will it let you do? Build Flash-centric apps that run on your desktop. One of the downsides of Web sites is that they cease to work if you aren’t connected to the Internet. Anyone who has tried to use Google Calendar inside an airplane can relate to that experience.

Lots of new apps ahead. Ryan Stewart has the best blog about the new Rich Internet Application space, which is what Apollo will let developers build apps for. Competes with Microsoft’s WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation).

First read? Microsoft is ahead in workflow and 3D, but Adobe is ahead in ubiquity and cross-platform. Lots of developers like using Macs now, and Microsoft only makes WPF tools for Windows. Also, there’s WPF/E (for “everywhere”) but it is a small subset of WPF, so developers might find that to be frustrating and limiting and decide to go with Apollo.

What do you think? If you’re a developer are you looking to build these kinds of connected desktop apps? If you are, what platform are you going to choose?

As with anything hot in tech, I’m putting the best posts on my link blog (another great Kathy Sierra post is on there now too).

I hate evites. Here’s why.

Tonight Maryam and I are going to the Tango Diva book launch party. Everything is hunky dory. Right?

Wrong. The evite email that I have doesn’t have any information on it. It doesn’t tell me where the party is. It doesn’t tell me when it starts. It forces me to click over to the Web site to look at all that info. I really, really hate that (because I drag emails from people to my calendar to keep the date and I hate clicking away from my calendar just to learn pertinent information because the service an inviter used is trying to collect page views by forcing me to visit the site).

So, when I saw MyPunchbowl.com today — founder Matt Douglas was here to show it to Maryam and me — that was one of my first concerns.

It passed the test. The emails that come from MyPunchBowl have all the pertinent information in them.

But that’s not all. It far exceeds evite by including integration with Google Maps for location, Flickr for photos before and after the event, an event-store lookup, and other cool features. Maryam liked the ability to customize emails per invitee (evite doesn’t do that either).

Anyway, it’s going to be hard for MyPunchbowl to compete with evite, because evite is such a strong brand name and has so many users, but I’m cheering it on because it’s superior to evite. Please, if you’re going to invite me to your next party, use MyPunchbowl. My calendar will love you for it.

I was just over reading Steve Rubel’s blog where he links to a BusinessWeek article about Google and its struggles to improve its business. I guess Google has noticed that most people only use one thing, the search engine (Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, was quoted as saying that even its most die-hard fans can’t remember many of its major products).

Well, remember that Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo I put up last week? Turns out it had 50% more visits than our other podcasts last week. This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed that, either. Over on Channel 9 our videos regularly got more visits than the Web site for the product or service we were discussing.

It’s a YouTube, er Google Video, world.

So, here’s a little test I did. I searched for:

Blogger Demo video. None found.
Google Calendar Demo video. None found.
Google Desktop Demo video. None found. Even worse is that there’s one of my videos there from Channel 9 showing off a competitive product.
Google Dodgeball Demo video. None found.
Google Earth Demo video. None found. Oh, there’s another one of my Channel 9 videos again.
Google Groups Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.
Google Maps Demo video. None found. Another one of my Channel 9 videos are there.

Should I go on? I could — seems like almost none of the Google product teams has put a simple video demo of its products up online and if they have, they certainly didn’t make them findable. Seems to me that this would be a great thing to do for Google. I’m sure such videos would be linked into Wikipedia’s list almost instantly.

So, here’s my offer. I’ll come over and do an interviewwith each of your product teams and get a five-minute demo of your products. With my sooopppeeerrrr dddooooppppeeeerrrrr Sony HD camcorder. For free.

That’s what we did on Friday for Scrapblog and Jajah (I don’t charge for this, and am doing it for lots of little companies — we’ll even have a new show we’ll announce soon where it’ll be even easier to get your demo online, you won’t even need to convince me via email that I should come over).

Even better offer for Google? I’ll even put all the Google ones up on Google Video as well as put them on the ScobleShow.

Oh, how powerful is this? Well, do a Google search for “Adobe Acrobat 8 video demo” and what do you find? My video. And, yes, we’re getting visits from Google so I know someone is looking for video demos of products.

Anyway, want to do a demo? 425-205-1921. You won’t even need to pay $30,000 like you would if you were going to this week’s Demo conference (everyone who gets on the stage there pays for the privilege and everyone in the audience pays too).

Why do they pay? Because they know the power of demoing to an influential audience. Funny thing is that there’s a far cheaper (and more effective) way to do the same demo on my show. By the way, the number of people who’ve now seen the Adobe Acrobat 8 video I did is many times bigger than the attendance of the Demo conference this week.

It’s amazing to me that Google hasn’t done this on its own, actually.

That’s Courtney Hohne, PR manager at Google (she’s pulling some of the hard-to-come-by Google stickers out of her bag to give to me, gotta love a PR person who hands out swag. I promptly stuck one on my tripod).

Her claim to fame? She was the one who did the PR for the Google Apps for Your Domain press coverage last week. She told me she didn’t have any ulterior motive other than she didn’t brief enough people and got heck for it (even Business Week’s Rob Hof says he wasn’t briefed). I told her don’t brief me, but start with the Z list — a blogger with four readers will get noticed almost as quickly as if Michael Arrington wrote it. She told me that she’ll try to make more use of the email mailing lists that Google is building over on the Google Press Center, so if you’re a blogger you might want to subscribe to their mailing lists if you want to get news from Courtney. Anyway, I respected Courtney a lot for coming out and meeting with me. That’s the sign of a good PR practitioner, they take the bad with the good.

Speaking of good and bad PR, did you see Frank Shaw’s blog? He runs the Microsoft account for Waggener Edstrom and he had to clean up a mess by another PR guy in the UK who said “I don’t get blogs.” If a PR person said that to me I’d say “I don’t get why you’re still employed.”

It seems to me that if you don’t understand something you should work hard to understand it.

Which, brings me to Google Calendar. I wrote last week that I don’t get why I should use Google Calendar instead of Exchange and Outlook. So, yesterday I met with the Google Calendar team to explain why I missed Outlook. Really I do.

Some things that bugged me, though, like how when I just accidentally click on the Google Calendar it wants to create an event for me, are actually features that they discovered in user testing. At least that’s what Carl Sjogreen, the guy who runs the Calendar team, told me. He said that before they added that users couldn’t figure out how to add a new event and after they added that they could.

He also showed me how they build the Web into everything they do, and don’t just make it an afterthought. For instance, I can share my calendar with you in a variety of ways. I could just share my calendar out with you as a Web page (I almost did that, but I realized there’s some stuff on there that people sent me in confidence, so can’t share that, sorry). Or, I can build a specialized calendar and share that with you in a box on my blog to the right. That kind of Web-thought is deep at Google and is going to be how they come at the Enterprise world.

You might not switch your Outlook/Exchange calendar to Google for many years to come, but they’ll come in the back door by getting you to start new calendars that you can share with your family, friends, and with the Internet at large. I’m going to do a new calendar just for my video show, for instance, and share that with you so you’ll be able to see both interviews that are upcoming as well as shows that I’ve both published and that are going to come up. I’ll try to have that calendar done by the end of the weekend.

Yeah, he admitted that they have a lot of work to do on mobile phone sync and the other stuff I asked for (offline, for instance and better email integration). When Google solves those problems they’ll have something very interesting that will see usage inside corporations.

Anyway, after talking with Google yesterday I headed off to meet Kaboodle’s CEO, Manish Chandra. He designed Kaboodle to make it easier to keep track of projects you’re doing on the Web. That sounds pretty cold compared to what it really does though. Let’s say you’re planning out a vacation and you’re visiting dozens of sites, keeping track of the places you want to visit, or the hotels you’re considering and you’re working with other family members. Kaboodle helps you store all those Web sites and pieces of things you’re tracking, and put them in one place, and also collaborate with other people on them. Pretty cool stuff.

Last night Daniel McVicar (who has been an actor on the popular soap opera “The Bold and The Beautiful” had dinner with me last night). I didn’t even realize just how big a star he was until I read his Wikipedia page this morning. He has a funny vlog. Last night he was wearing a Ze Frank t-shirt (I snapped a picture of that on my Flickr feed. Hey, he’s in the ORG! Watch out for those “little duckies.” He can’t get the damn song out of his head either. Heh, Rabbit Bites made fun of his vlog already.

Hope you’re having a good Friday. While I was out meeting the geeks and interviewing people more than 50 more emails came in that haven’t been answered yet (and that’s after cleaning out the ones that aren’t important or were spam). Yikes. I’m gonna take the weekend off and see if I can catch up on my email a bit. Have a great one (it’s Labor Day weekend here in the United States, thanks to everyone who does the work that keeps this world running).

I was reading Don Dodge, former executive from Alta Vista. He’s seen his share of failure so I always learn something from him. Anyway, he links to an interesting analysis of why Kiko (a Web-based calendar) failed.

Heck, I’m nearly being forced to use Google Calendar and I really really really hate it (sorry, I’m an Outlook addict). If Google can’t get me excited about its calendar there’s no way that I’ll use a calendar from a company I’ve never heard of, don’t trust. Sorry. That’s the entrepreneur’s challenge. Google can win me over just by sheer momentum. Translation: my boss will say “you vil use Google and you vil like it.”

Actually I’m making Google sound worse than it is, but I need a calendar that synchs with my SmartPhone, that lets me work offline, etc.

A friend who works at Google says that they aren’t even using Google calendar internally right now. I hear that Google’s employees hate the Oracle-based solution they are currently using, but that Google Calendar needs more work to be usable for an enterprise.

I can tell you that is true. I’m using two calendars. One in Outlook, one in Google. Why? Cause the rest of the company is on Google.

Anyway, back to the headline. Does it predict more failures?

Yes.

There are simply too many companies chasing too few users.

I can not keep up with the flow in my email box. I’ll share some of that with you real soon.

Getting the cool kids to try your technology isn’t the same thing as having a long-term business proposition.

It’s my challenge too. If I don’t get an audience and keep it I’ll be laying myself off someday after our VC money runs out (that’s what I did last time the bubble burst).

Onward.

Note: some of these things will win. That’s why we all play the game. Google survived the last bubble&burst. Who’ll do that next time? Not Kiko.

Whew, an female IT calendar in Australia is getting a bit of attention.

Whoever funded this should have seen the controversy coming a mile away. I must be getting cynical in my old age, but I have a sneaking suspicion they knew that a controversy was coming and that it’d sell calendars. But the heat got too hot in the kitchen, so to speak.

Unfortunately this isn’t an issue I’m willing to touch on my blog. Why? Cause our attitudes toward sex and toward smart women just are totally messed up and there’s no way I can fix that with a blog post. Translation: I’m chicken. Heheh.

It’ll be interesting fodder for BlogHer, though.

Update: heheh. Maryam blogged about the exact same thing, even though we didn’t plan that out, then started telling me off cause she read my blog. It’s funny blogging together. We’re so competitive. Maryam says she’s a narcisist. Heheh. I love her too!