Mood Stones Gets A Birthday Makeover

As you may (or may not) be aware, I created and run a little Facebook application called Mood Stones. It's a simple idea carried out in (hopefully) the simplest way. Well, this month my little baby turns one so to celebrate I gave it some love at the weekend to spruce it up a bit.

I ditched one of my advertisers to save some vertical space (the majority of users are still running 1024x768) and replaced the boring dropdown list with a hover-over menu which is a lot more visually pleasing (see below). I've also switched it over to use the wider Facebook canvas that became available with the new Facebook design a week or so back.

Since going live in September of 2007 (I'm unsure of the exact date but the first stone was created on September 1st and the first Wall post is dated September 5th) I've battled through multiple Facebook API "updates" and have just recovered from the recent Facebook redesign and can now start looking at adding in some of the new features Facebook offers. I've made it harder on myself by relying on 2 third-parties to get to my users: Facebook (obviously) and the Microsoft-commissioned .Net Toolkit. At least it works now.

Mood Stones has also grown from a little one-man-band to a three-person band with Hannelore Reynders of Belgium joining the team in June this year and in August Émilie Léger of Montreal had her first set of stones go live. I've also had heaps of help from the fans during the year with input for mood descriptions among other things from Heather and lots of great flower photos from Ledena. There are many others so thanks to you all!

To give you an idea of some of the numbers there are 87,046 registered users (people who have it installed) with 1,187 of them registered as "fans" of Mood Stones.

Happy birthday MS, here's to another 12 months!

Invite Your Friends To The Facebook Movie

From the WTF section of the human race comes news today that Aaron Sorkin (West Wing, Studio 60, Charlie Wilson's War) is currently writing a movie about the inception of Facebook. No, you didn't misread that, a movie about Facebook.

Sorkin has created a Facebook page and an Aaron Sorkin & the Facebook Movie Group on Facebook where he states that he is indeed writing the script.

"I've just agreed to write a movie for Sony and producer Scott Rudin about how Facebook was invented. I figured a good first step in my preparation would be finding out what Facebook is, so I've started this page. (Actually it was started by my researcher, Ian Reichbach, because my grandmother has more Internet savvy than I do and she's been dead for 33 years.)"

What's next? A book about Google?

North Americans Can't Play Scrabble

Kotaku tells me today that US and Canadian Facebookers can no longer play Scrabulous due to the ongoing lawsuit from Hasbro (the legal owners of Scrabble which Scrabulous is a total rip-off of).

Personally I'm surprised it has taken this long for them to be (partially) shut down the application but then again, Hasbro did just release their own Facebook Scrabble application made by EA.

Of course, I'm not from North America so I can still play Scrabulous if I feel so inclined.

I Love Web 2.0, It's So Casual

Back in the good ol' days websites were strung together with rubber bands and tooth picks but the big players were always up and running.

Well, these days we don't care about that kind of thing, so long as we have RSS feeds of our friend's bowel movements and ads all over the site (when it's up) we're all good.