I just set up my new blog, garden.rodeworks.com, as the growingthoughts app on Facebook.  Making it an app allows some pretty cool features.  For instance users can install the app on their Facebook profile pages, comment on posts directly there, and invite others to add the app to their pages.  I don’t actually expect many people to do this with my little bit of content, but for a more commercial site what a great way to expand the draw of your content.  Write once and distribute to multiple outlets!

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I get a fair amount of useful information off of my twitter feed — in fact it is often more informative than the RSS newsfeeds I follow.  But Twitter, Facebook, Yammer and the rest of the live streaming applications share a common problem.  If you want to refer back to something that floated by several days, weeks or months ago you are pretty much out of luck.   The noise factor is not an issue when monitoring the stream live.  I mean sure, there is plenty of noise, but it is easy enough to filter it out as the garbage floats by.  But try to dig through items from the past and the noise quickly overwhelms.  Anyone got an answer?  Or is do we just need to accept that we must leave the past behind — even if it is digital?

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A new open source project from FaceBook, HipHop for PHP, could bring big improvements for PHP developers.  From the description on Facebook’s Developers site HipHop for PHP will translate PHP code into C++, reducing cpu usage by as much at 50%.  And for a big site like FaceBook, written in PHP, this is a pretty significant improvement.  The ease of writing in PHP, with the performance benefits of C++ — sounds like a great combination.  There is nothing except an announcement so far, but expect more very soon.

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In checking out a Tweet, I caught a nice feature on Posterous.com.  You can leave a comment identifying yourself via your Facebook or Twitter account.  I don’t actually know if this is through OpenID (more likely it uses their basic APIs) but it is nicely executed, and eases the path-to-participation.

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A recent study by the UK-based National Literacy Trust finds blogging, Facebook, texting and other such writing results in a “strong correlation” with better overall reading and writing.  Their study looked at kids aged 9 – 16.  Big surprise?  Success here leads to greater interest in traditional forms of writing, and the use of more informal writing styles online doesn’t seem to have a negative impact.

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Flickr, the coolest on-line photo site there is, has always encouraged outside developers to build their own applications that utilize the massive Flickr public database.  I have had a Flickr account like forever, before Yahoo bought them — and have used some WordPress – Flickr plug-ins that utilized the API.  But the problem was you had to find the apps yourself, spread around on developers own web pages.  Well Flickr just launched a new page that provides an easy way to find apps.  I found a cool Facebook app that will display my latest Flickr uploads on my Facebook page — very handy.

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