If you really must line the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg by writing a Facebook application, be sure the application takes advantage of the nature of Facebook. First and foremost, it’s a social networking site, so your application should have some social aspect to it. Many academic Facebook applications are merely search boxes or other non-social search and information services transposed to Facebook (e.g., JSTOR Search or the countless library search widgets). Study Groups, on the other hand, gets it right by emphasizing the networking and collaboration possible within Facebook.

As if CHNM Creative Lead Jeremy Boggs and web developer Dave Lester don’t have enough to do during the day building fantastic web applications like Omeka, they have somehow managed to create a couple of incredibly useful and highly polished WordPress plugins for academia, and have launched the ScholarPress site as a hub for CHNM work in this fertile area. (Another recent WordPress plugin that academics should take note of is the Institute for the Future of the Book’s CommentPress.)

ScholarPress’s inaugural plugins are Courseware and WPBook. Courseware (co-developed by New York Public Library’s Josh Greenberg), turns WordPress, normally a blogging platform, into a full-fledged course management system, including easy syllabus creation, assignments, bibliographies, and scheduling. (And yes, you can have a class blog too.) WPBook creates your very own Facebook application out of your WordPress blog, allowing it to be embedded in Facebook.

Want to bring your class right into Facebook, where your students spend most of their time online? Simply combine the two plugins and create a class Facebook app that your students can install. Brilliant.