[RLorenzen]

This may be a dumb question, but what are facebook applications and how are they used?

[jumper666jr]

jfgi

[HarveyJ]

Well, do you have a FaceBook page yet?
Logging in and checking out the apps is probably a better way of figuring out what they are and how they're used than getting anyone to explain it.
Most of them are pointless little entertainment things, like monster fighting, and aquariums. There are the occasionally useful ones for personal and marketing purposes. i.e. I have a wine diary app. Good for me because wine diaries are expensive to buy, good for wine makers because they know what people with the app are drinking and what demographic range they fall in.

Unless you mean how do you make one, and how're they're used to make money...
I'm not sure on the specifics of making one, although there are tutorials and SDKs on FaceBook somewhere.
Making money out of them is basically a matter of getting people to install the app on their page, and then harvesting their info, as FaceBook allows all the app makes to do that. You then use that info as a demographic table that you can attempt to sell to people that are potentially interested.

[RLorenzen]

Thanks Harvey