Welcome one and all to the debut of the Make Use Of audio podcast! Every Sunday, I will be presenting a short show where I will be going over recently published posts on the site and also one of the Make Use Of writers will appear to be interviewed. This week, it’s the creator and overlord of Make Use Of, Aibek Esengulov!

This is a great opportunity for you, the reader, to put a voice to the Make Use Of writers. Instead of just reading the words, you can now listen to the writers that create those words, listen to their personality, hear about their motivations and laugh along to any bloopers that might happen along the way.

Do you remember when Facebook was only for college students? It seems so long ago now that anyone and everyone has a Facebook profile. With the addition of website pages, artist pages, and blog tools, I am on Facebook more now than ever. If you have a Facebook profile (as I’m sure most Make Use Of readers do) then you are probably aware of the 20,000+ applications that are available. While many of them are pointless, there are some that are quite good. Here are the top 5 facebook applications that don’t totally suck:

1. Scrabulous

As a pretty big fan of PC gaming, I have always wanted a better way to find my friends online and jump into a server with them. Well, XFire provides that solution and so much more.

You can grab XFire here and quickly install it. Once installed, XFire will automatically detect all of the games on your computer and prompt you to enter any of your friends’ emails, names or XFire names. This makes it extremely easy to get started.

XFire supports a massive amount of games from popular games like Counter-Strike to small time wasters like Zuma Deluxe. If you want to look at the exhaustive list, you can find it here.

MediaMonkey is a full-featured music player and music collection organizer. It can convert audio, automatically rename your files, find duplicates and missing tags, create and save playlists, generate statistical reports and more!

Believe it or not, MediaMonkey comes with many FREE features that make it easy to organize your music collection and enjoy the latest Gnarls Barkley or Beethoven. If you are throwing a party (wild, crazy, or otherwise), just set the “Party Mode” and you don’t have to worry about your friends and guests changing the playlist.

Why do I need MediaMonkey?

These are my TOP 5 in covering time gaps with more joy and less boredom:

(1) Ask 500 People

I spend a good deal of my working day living inside Google Reader. It is my research assistant, bringing me stories from multiple sources all over the web that I may want to follow up on later. But the continual problem with “multiple sources” is the increasing “noise”, the information overload and the increased likelihood that in among all those stories crowding into Google Reader is the one truly great story, the gem that is going to get trampled by the crowd. That is why AideRSS is becoming an interesting assistant to my assistant!