A few weeks ago I wrote a post pointing out the growing usefulness of Facebook as a business tool. It isn’t that I am so enamored with the social network as I am optimistic that the new open platform will allow developers to create some very useful business applications.

Today I want to tell you about one such application that I think meets that criteria. The application is called Google Shared Items. This application allows Facebook members to easily do two very useful things. First, it makes it very easy to feature your blog posts on your profile page (your Facebook home page) allowing your network to get a taste of your blog. There are other ways to do this, but this one really works well.

The real power behind that app though is that it also allows you to see a list of all the blog posts that your friends/network have shared (Shared by bookmarking them in their Google Reader) and then ranked as the most popular items. This feature gives you your very own Digg like tool to discover changing content that, if your network is like minded, will provide you with a fabulous resource of relevant reading that you may never discover on your own.

The application is very simple to install and does require a Google Reader account as well. You can see my public Google Reader Shared stream here. This is the content that is then flowing to the Facebook application for other to view and share. Of course, this is for any content in your reader that your want to share, not just your own blog posts, but those of all the blogs you read - and it throws off an RSS feed so there are countless other ways for you to repurpose this content outside of Facebook as well.

A lot of folks are flocking to Facebook and then getting there and saying, now what?

So, if you’ve discovered business uses and applications for business use, post a comment and let us know!

4:00:09 PM