We'll concede that the average Facebook user is doing nothing productive with their day, likely burning hours on end playing Mob Wars or agonizing over the finer points of a 25 More Things You Didn't Know About Me note. Or perhaps goading colleagues into frittering away their time in endless rounds of Scrabble. But it turns out that the uber-popular social networking site is good for more than just fooling around. In fact, many Facebook applications can be so surprisingly productive and useful that you might not ever have to leave its environs during your Web-browsing day. Dare we even suggest you might be able to get honest-to-God work done using Facebook? Poke your boss and make sure he knows! Here are some of our favorite Facebook apps for the truly obsessive.
Zoho Online Office
Local Picks
Just because you're a shut-in who never logs off of Facebook doesn't mean you don't need to eat once in a while. The TripAdvisor-developed Local Picks app has more than 530,000 restaurants covered in its entirely Facebookized recommendation utility, letting you read millions of reviews and, of course, add your own. An easy map-and-zoom system lets you locate the nosh nearest your intersection. You can also compare your ratings with those of friends--and find out who among your Facebook circle has the same "dining compatibility" as you. Don't forget to chew thoroughly.
Bottlenotes
Meetups
What's going on out there in the real world? So-called "meetups" are becoming an increasingly popular way for like-minded citizens to get together and expound on their love for beer, board games, Obama, or just about anything else. Mind you, attending a meetup does require leaving your house, so if that's too much trouble, you can get a lot of enjoyment out of just browsing the application to see exactly how far out some of these meetups can get. Turns out people will meet in real life to talk about anything.
Dynamite Webcam
Web Presence
Web Presence doesn't really do anything for you, but it can be a great help for your legions of fans and friends: It's a blogroll of sorts, all about you: Just punch in the URLs for your Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and other social networking accounts, and Web Presence gathers them all up, adding the appropriate icon for each site into its convenient box. You aren't limited to just the major social networking sites, either; you can add links to your personal blog or, really, to any Web site you want, making it not just a handy directory of your Web presence, but a place to drop your favorite bookmarks, too.