DISQUS

As someone who is, at the moment, in a dead-on Rawlsian "Veil of Ignorance" situation—my app, which I personally think is nifty but who knows, was just added to the Directory—the recent changes fill me with unmitigated delight. Users are the point of Facebook, not Developers, and anything that helps users distinguish between apps that are useful to them and useless to them is a good thing. If my app had failed to attract a satisfying user base under the old system, I would have just shrugged and assumed that my app was indeed lost in the Library of Babel. Now, I will have to take it as a meaningful metric and hence a form of constructive criticism. Anyone who isn't looking for constructive criticism shouldn't be designing apps.

Although it's an extremely nicely-designed instantiation, it should be noted that this is basically a slice of the DS's Big Brain Academy cut out and plopped into a social-network scoreboard framework. One mini-game's ripped off of Brain Age 2, though, so at least they shopped around some.

Thurber's a genius. A very nice package of Thurber cartoons and articles (excepting my own, which sucked,) is in the Comics Journal Winter 2003 Special, the one with a William Stout cover. Ivan Brunetti's biographical faux-Thurber cartoons are especially stunning.