Ten Great Facebook Games and Apps

By Carolyn Abram from Facebook For Dummies, 4th Edition

Facebook offers a variety of applications (all of which were built by outside developers). To find any of these applications, just search for their names from the search box in the big blue bar on top. Then, go to their Application Page and click the Go to App button.

Typing Maniac: On the surface, measuring the speed of one’s typing sounds like something only professional stenographers would want to know. However, Typing Maniac, a game available to be played on Facebook, tests that theory. As words float down the screen, you must type them before they hit the bottom. As you move up the levels, the words get longer and move down the screen faster.
Bejeweled Blitz: Bejeweled Blitz is a fairly simple matching game. You try to make groups of three from a chart of jewels. The fun part comes in when you compete with your friends (whose scores are always looming to the right). You can then choose to share your high scores on your timeline, and you can even post video replays of your brilliance.
CityVille: CityVille is one of the many games created by the people at Zynga. Other Zynga games you may have heard of include FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars, and many, many others. CityVille’s premise is that you are the founder of a city, and it’s your job to build the basics so that people will move in and make your city great. You start out with a few residences and then build up until you earn enough to create skyscrapers, public parks, and high-rise apartment buildings. You can appoint friends to be members of your local government and you can be a tourist in their cities. Your achievements get posted to your timeline for your friends to see.
Word Challenge: Word Challenge is a game that presents you with a series of letters and asks you to make as many word combinations as possible. The longer the words you get, the more time gets added to the round. Bonus rounds require you to discover a friend’s name within a series of letters. You can then see how you stack up against your friends and post any new high scores to your timeline.
Groupcard: Groupcard is an application that replicates the real-world experience of passing a card around to be signed at a party. Groupcard allows you to choose a card type and the basic look and feel of the card, and then invite others to sign it. Each person who signs it can select a variety of fonts, as well as pull from his photos to find an appropriate one to send with the card. After everyone has signed, the card then gets “sent” to its intended recipient.
Book List Challenge: Book List Challenge is a really simple application that asks you how many of the 100 Great Books (as determined by the BBC) you have read. Your response is then shared with your friends, and they can take the quiz as well.
Carpool, by Zimride: The Carpool application allows people to offer and request rides to wherever they need to go. It can be used to organize regular carpools to and from work (especially useful when people at your company have actually joined your workplace network) or to find company for longer, one-time road trips.
Museum of Me, by Intel: The Museum of Me is a beautiful Facebook application that mostly happens outside of Facebook. Connect Facebook with Intel’s Museum of Me, and Intel pulls timeline information to create a beautiful virtual museum that is all about you. As you move through the rooms, you can see photo memories of your friends, geographic representations of them, and more. The music makes it that much more nostalgic. After you’ve toured the museum, you can post an album of photos of the museum back to Facebook. Especially for people who’ve been using Facebook for a few years, this makes a great trip down memory lane.
Visual Bookshelf: You can see what your friends are reading, post reviews and ratings for the books you have finished, and geek out on books to your heart’s content. Have you ever been unable to find something good to read? This app helps you solve that problem more seamlessly than any book club could.
Last.fm: Last.fm is a radio website. You choose music stations based on artists you like, and last.fm streams music to your computer. If you choose to log in to Last.fm by connecting it with your Facebook account, Last.fm instantly pulls the names of artists you like from your Facebook timeline. Additionally, you can connect with your Facebook friends and see what they are listening to. It takes all the work out of setting up your favorite radio stations. You just log in and you're good to go.