After eons of no news...here's more no-news. Flowing Data, a blog which just loves statistics, numbers and the like, have come out with radical new study of no less an institution than Facebook applications.

They took what must have been one of the most painful datasets known to humanity - 23160 different Facebook applications, and analysed by category. The shock revelation?

Most are inane useless gibber. Bam! A good 9609 of them, slightly over 40% can only be categorised as "Just for fun". The Poorhouse imagines "fun" is probably the name given for those idiot bite-your-friends zombie applications and the like, because "Annoyance" didn't seem to be a category in itself. The next two biggest categories were gaming and sports, again, not innately useful stuff most often - although the Poorhouse does love his Scrabulous it must be said.

Nonetheless, you might be amazed to hear there were a few apps out there that could be plausiblyish enough pushed into such serious-face categories as money & politics, along with more immediately utilitarian sections of the app-o-sphere like chat, events etc. (because of course native Facebook couldn't possibly handle any of the latter). The Poorhouse would just love to hear of any genuinely useful (to him) Facebook apps mind, do write in.