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What are people using Facebook applications for? Tim O’Reilly teases us with some tidbits from a report his company’s published The Facebook Application Ecosystem: Why Some Thrive–and Most Don’t.

In it Shelley Farnham takes a look at the different apps that are successful on Facebook. Taking a snapshot from a week in November last year, Shelley breaks down the applications people were using by type.

The top 5 categories were:

1. Enhanced communication
2. Social comparison
3. Play social game
4. Social selection
5. Profile enhancement

In her blog post about the report – which damn your effective marketing via blogs, O’Reilly, I am going to buy – Shelley shares the following piece of analysis:

In reviewing the dominant types of applications, it is clear that most of the applications are helping users achieve social goals such as improved communication, learning about the self relative to others, finding similar others, improving self-presentation, engaging in social play, and engaging in social exchanges via gifts and media. Despite its shifting demographics, Facebook is still very much a social arena in the private, personal domain, not the professional domain.

What does this tell us? Now on the one hand most readers of this blog will be, like, y’know, so over Facebook and merrily back to blogging, Twittering and tying it all up with FriendFeed, but the analysis is still a very useful one, if we think of the Facebook community as a sample of a mainstream users of social media, many of them trying out social apps and widgets for the first time.

So apart from when people share your drumming monkey video using other apps, there’s little hope of a brand building a Facebook app that gets used unless it is useful for people within the context of the social space. For brands to have any relevance in widget-building, it will take an ethos of understanding your networks, being , useful to people in them and being live to tweak apps and learn from their use.