Facebook: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Customizing Facebook and Adding Applications

Facebook is a pretty polished-looking site, and it wants to stay that way. Unlike MySpace—where you can customize just about everything on your personal page—you can’t go hog wild changing the way Facebook looks. You can adjust only the layout of your Home page and profile ever so slightly. But you can do something much cooler than, say, changing the background color of your profile page: Facebook lets you add applications—tiny programs that run inside Facebook.

Second only to the friend-to-friend interactions Facebook tracks for you, applications are one of the main reasons for Facebook’s explosive popularity. Why? They’re fun! And they can be useful, too. Applications let you do everything from silly stuff (like “spray painting” on your friends’ Walls or sending your friends virtual potted plants that grow a little each day) to useful things (like creating a terrific-looking resumé from right inside Facebook). If you can imagine it, somebody’s probably created an application that lets you do it.

Facebook granted programmers free access to the Facebook platform (the code they need to write things for the site) in May of 2007, meaning that anybody with the programming chops and the desire could create an application. Since then, the number of applications has skyrocketed to over half a million, according to Facebook. Read on to learn how to find and install the best of the bunch.

Modifying Your Home Page and Profile

Facebook gives ...