The ‘new’ Facebook? I wasn’t aware there was anything wrong with the old one. So, I clicked with an anticipated caution, and overall, I’m very pleased with what I’ve found.

Facebook’s always been a special site to me. Ever since my University was ‘allowed’ into the network in early 2005, I’ve been in love with the site – a clean, simple, and effective alternative to MySpace. As it’s grown, I’ve stood by it’s changes as clever and innovative, even when others haven’t (coughminifeedcough). Facebook has never been afraid to take risks, and tonight they are taking a huge one, as the changes to the platform are massive, and a bit genius.

The most obvious change to the site is they took the mini-feed, and they took the wall, and apparently made a baby with them. I call it Wall-eed. I just knew there was something up when they added comments to feed stories, and this explains it. I have to wonder what the main Facebook community is going to think of such a change, seeing as the mini-feed wasn’t very well recepted, and now it’s a main feature of the web application.

While it’s quite a shock to lose the wall as we knew it (I remember back when your wall was nothing more than a giant textarea field), it still does in exist in an alternative viewport. However, this cuts off any resemblance of a mini-feed, and I’d like to think the two can exist in haromy.

There’s a few other new pages to your Facebook profile now. Your basic info’s now thrown into an ‘Info’ page, and I have to say, they did a very nice job with the layouts. Facebook’s always had elegant UI, and they’ve stepped it up, going to a wider, 3 column layout. There are still a few kinks to work out… I’m a huge fan of Pages and Facebook really needs to tighten up the display to show more than 5 items – now there’s the room.

They’ve also put Photos onto it’s own page, which makes sense – Facebook’s mobile upload ability has made it one of the most popular photo-sharing websites on the Internet.

Lastly, it’s interesting that they put all the Facebook apps into a page called ‘Boxes’. How is this not a huge blow to Facebook apps as a whole? I mean, who’s gonna click on Boxes? Personally I’m already sick of the application puke that many of my friends have succumbed to, and I’m glad I’ll never have to see that crap again (if I could only get rid of the invite requests).

All in all, I like the new Facebook. Not love at first sight or anything, but it’s already growing on me.

And so, I introduce Wordle, but more specifically, Master Giraffe’s page that lets you convert your last.fm data to Wordle format (for import into Wordle, naturally).

Honestly, Wordle could use some work. It cuts out quite a bit and sometimes takes hard refresh to fix. Also… a Java applet? Really? It’s a limiting platform and leaves the app jumpy. However, the idea itself is one of the more clever things I’ve seen. It also generates really pretty displays, and is customizable in both layout and color, so there’s really not a lot of bad I can say about it.

So go ahead, if you have a last.fm account, check it out. Turn your music into art.

So, I’ll mention them all. First up is a site called Mint, which is just brilliant. You sync up your bank account info with them and they put your finances together in a spectacular array of animated bar graphs and pie charts. It also helps you manage your budget and find ways to save expenses. It’s also full of cute little statistics like the Starbucks data to the left (which apparently helps you realize you went a little crazy with the lattes). I’m a total nerd for this stuff, and the app, which is built in Flex, is smooth and responsive in ways which almost make me feel like a fool for sticking with this javascript stuff.

Besides Mint, there’s also a lot of other applications of all types that have been coming around. First, Versions is finally out, and it’s quickly found it’s way into my ‘most used apps’ list. There’s also 280 slides, which does amazing things with web-based presentation tools; Fluid, which turns any website into a self-running webkit-based application; a youtube/last.fm mashup, and more. Much more.

Firefox 3 is settling in, and every day I find something new I like about it. Today, I read an article that confirmed my beliefs that the new Firefox has fixed the memory leak problem which would often cause me headache. I also read about some of Firefox’s new css features and was stoked to see support for inline-block elements, in particular. It really makes me wish Firefox 2 just go off and die already… as bad as that sounds.

There’s some new things personally as well. I’ve decided to rejoin the twitter community. We have an awesomely made new feature on zenbe for twitter, and it makes twittering really convenient, so we’ll see how it all turns out. I’ve hooked it up to the sidebar, along with my tumblr accout, which I just love. Their pre-sets for media types are really clever, and it’s just fun and totally random.

I’ve also been working on some old ideas and some new ones – including a new method for analyzing your iTunes data, which I’m real excited about. It involves a lot of pie charts and bar graphs. Hopefully animated ones.

So expect more soon. New York is beautiful in the summer, and I’m feeling more productive than ever.