Social media is the new craze and one of the most popular platforms is Facebook. Facebook allows its users to develop applications which other users can add and use. So today I thought about a list of applications that I might use on Facebook.

Applications for Facebook can generally be grouped in two areas, business and entertainment. My focus is towards business. I can think of two ways of using Facebook so far:

1. Advertise your product(s): Use Facebook to advertise your products and allow people to browse through your products.
2. Advertise your service(s): Here I was thinking that maybe I allow developers and graphic designers to list themselves and find out about freelance work.
3. An application for Facebook questions: An application that allows you to post questions directly from your website to Facebook questions.

As a part of the whole Web 2.0 movement forums have proved invaluable, because they allow lots of users to collectively create and share content. Forums differ from blogs and wiki’s, and this is one of the main differences between all three solutions, is the way the information is displayed and handled. Forums use a post-and-reply method. This means that a registered user creates a topic on a forum and writes some content around that topic and then other registered users can comment on that topic. Only registered users can comment on topics, as opposed to blogs and wiki’s which can allow open access to any user.

I read an article recently that listed 8 Popular Open Source Forums, and from the list so far I tested PHPBB on one site and found it to be easy to install. I did find that the Afrikaans language pack was not updated or even available, which is a little disappointing. I then also tried a plugin for WordPress but found the display a little cluttered, and it just felt a little odd to have a forum inside a blog. Next in line is Vanilla, which amazingly is only 386kb when compared to the 2.16Mb of PHPBB. Vanilla took me 5 minutes to install and it is really a very lightweight forum script. You can go take a look here. I cannot run and test YetAnotherForum at this stage because it uses ASP.NET 2.0, but it really looks a bit like Invision’s forum.

Wiki’s and Blogs are two popular means by which people can create, share and collaborate on the world wide web. Creative collaboration is a term that can be used synonymously with Web 2.0, because at the heart of Web 2.0 is the creating and sharing of content between large numbers of users. That being said I have tried understanding in my own way what the difference is between a blog and a wiki, and I really want to use my own experience of the two to try and separate them as two different pieces of technology with potentially different uses and applications.

Blogs

A blog, in my view, is a website that uses a content management system that allows a user to create and publish narrative content that is intended for a large audience. The narrative ‘pieces’ are published in a journal-style way, with each published narrative ‘piece’ being listed on the website in a chronological fashion. A website that functions as a blog generally allows visitors to leave comments on each narrative piece. This website is an example of a blog.

Wiki’s

A wiki, in my opinion, is a website that uses a content management system that allows multiple users to create and collaborate content. I personally use a Wiki to document ideas and concepts for websites and share the content with users in my development team. I then let them add their ideas to the existing content and in so-doing build an effective document to work from. A wiki also allows users to search for topics and if they cannot find an item or topic it allows them to create the content. This is slightly different from the way a blog works.