So you wanna make FaceBook apps? I’m from Chicago. We have a certain way of doing business. Every company I have ever worked for has to be “scrappy”.  We’re a tough city, built on the backs of hard working blue collar, no frills, get your hands dirty, and as cheap and fast as possible. Apparently, I did not inherit many of these traits, I like expensive soap, I don’t like to sweat, and the last time I got my hands dirty was opening a computer case.  Regardless, I’m with them in spirit, especially when I look at creating Facebook apps or Myspace apps. I look for a way to create these as quickly, easily and inexpensively as possible.
Keep in mind that this is geared for people with little to no programming ability.  In the five following posts I am going to review websites you can go to create your own apps.

Five Quick, Free (or Almost Free)  and Easy Ways to Create Facebook Apps:

In my first review I’m going to go over BlogFuse. There doesn’t seem to be many reviews on this one, but it looks interesting.

#1.  BlogFuse.com

Type: Facebook Application Generator
Good for: Bloggers that want to feed their RSS into FaceBook.
Cost: Free for the first week, then it’s $5.00 a month.
Pros: Easy to use, and it creates a true facebook app.
Cons: You could probably do it yourself for free.

Website: http://facebook.blogfuse.com/
This one isn’t free, it’s free for a week and then charges you a monthly subscription fee. It’s aimed for bloggers that want to increase their reach, or companies that want to feed their RSS enabled blog into their facebook profiles.
BlogFuse seems to be less of an actual program that generates an app for you, than a basic instructional wizard that tells you how to create your own RSS fed Blog app on FaceBook. (With a little research you can create your own app for free using your RSS feed). Either way, for $5.00 a month, if you don’t want to hassle with figuring out how to create your own app then this is for you.

Side note on the signup process: it doesn’t like Firefox Beta 3 and also only takes Pay-Pal (both of which annoy me greatly).
One warning before you get started, after spending an hour or so trying to configure this and failing, be sure you configure this in one shot. If you walk away from the wizard for any length of time,  then come back, there is a strong chance this will not configure properly later on.

I would say the instructions are OK.  I got lost a few times when trying to configure it. The directions are not very straightforward in spots. For example, after you create your application name, it says you have to click “Options”. What it doesn’t tell you is you need to click “Edit Settings” then “Options”.  After a couple of times I got the app up and running.  Screen shots of the sign up process:

I won’t go through every step

For the most part, the wizard is pretty straight forward and with little to no programming skills (following directions CAREFULLY :-P) you can set up a full fledged application for your blog that you can invite friends to and use.
Bottom line: Great for a beginner that wants to do one thing; feed their RSS enabled blog into Facebook, and is willing to pay someone to tell them how to do it. But if you take a few moments and do some research you can save yourself $5.00 a month. For example, if you want to do what BlogFuse does for free, check out this:
http://www.howtoforge.com/rss_facebook_app_php

^^ Of course, this will require a little more work and some basic programming.

Pretty much BlogFuse for free.
Anyway, in the next day: Widgetbox.