DISQUS

Yeah--feature's definitely been around since "Posted Items" was introduced. Also, it doesn't necessarily only find four--it's gotten up to 8 for me. I think it just depends on how many pictures there are on the site. Sometimes it picks up weird images poorly designed sites use in the site design but appear to be normal jpeg images. It usually works pretty well for me, so maybe there's a temporary problem that they're working to fix. It always works for videos...

I prefer the "Books" application--it has a more minimalist design and is easier to use.

Yeah--I definitely agree with the web directory analogy. I don't think they've done a good enough job of giving users the tools to find applications. Facebook should be able to make recommendations based on what you've added so far (in the same way that Google Sidebar recommends gadgets) or a list of the applications most popular among your friends. Right now, for example, having 30 straight applications for hockey team news makes it difficult to really get to what new applications have just been launched. The "Recently Popular" doesn't really work very well either, I don't think.

I'm going to disagree. For example, today a PayPal application was launched, which is pretty revolutionary. The combined reputation and security of PayPal and Facebook could really take non-shopping online payment mainstream. I think more and more it's the established companies that are going to take the time (and have the expertise) to build great application. Another example would be Yahoo!'s new music videos application, which is incredibly well done. It's going to be hard for non-corporations to compete with this kind of quality. If this is a good or bad thing is up for debate, but I don't thinik we've hit a saturation point as it will take more time for well thought out applications to be launched.