A raft of apps to help you reach Facebook

Facebook says its most active users - by a factor of two - are the more than 200 million people accessing the social site through mobile devices.

Those users are getting access in all sorts of ways. They're messaging status updates from basic cell phones, checking out friends through a serviceable mobile website (m.facebook.com), and posting photos with smartphone and iPad apps.

A raft of those apps are not provided by Facebook Inc. itself. Rather, third-party software developers have been whipping up improvements to Facebook's own vanilla-flavored interface.

Their contributions include apps with names such as Friendly Facebook, by Oeconway Inc.; and Facely: Personality for Facebook, from G-Whizz Apps L.L.C. Some are doing a good job of it, too.

Jason Dinh Ba Thanh, a student in Singapore, is part of a two-person team that came up with a Facebook browser for the iPhone in November and for the iPad a month later.

In an e-mail, Thanh wrote that he had been frustrated by what he considered limited access to Facebook on his iPad, "so we built the app for that reason."

Their Pica HD - Facebook Browser has free and 99-cent versions. When I first downloaded and started the free version for iPad, the stylish display opened at my Facebook "wall."

Most notable on the free version is a narrow bar of advertising along the bottom of the screen. That went away when I switched to the 99-cent app.

One bug I encountered came whenever I touched the "chat" icon. Each time I tried it over several days, the app told me, "Facebook Chat is experiencing technical problems."

Under a tab for "Friends," I could choose among browsing a list of my Facebook friends, a "phone book" that extracted mobile numbers for all the friends I could see, and a "pages" list of links to themed pages set up by my friends.

When I tried to tinker with settings, the app made it clear I was entitled only to the introductory "dark Angel" color scheme for screen borders in the free version, but with the purchase I could upgrade to other styles, with names such as Mothership, Blue Bird, Dead Simple, and Santa Claus (a blue motif, with a red Santa hat on the "e" in Facebook).

Thanh promises he's "doing some groundwork for the next version of the app. It'll be a lot faster, slicker, easier to use."

Facebook takes an impartial view of the plethora of apps. A spokesman said the company was working "with everyone in the mobile industry - operators, device manufacturers, and mobile-app developers - to ensure people can have access to Facebook from wherever they are, whenever they want it."

Then there's BieberHair, for iPhone, by iBroomCloset L.L.C. The 99-cent app lets you plaster teen star Justin Bieber's helmet hairdo on people and pets when you take their pictures - and is supposed to let you upload the ridiculous results to Facebook. I tried it during the Grammy Awards this week, but the app failed to connect to Facebook.

I ended up posting the now-embarrassing photo from my laptop, so the app was a disappointment.

Facebook's primer on how to use it via mobile devices is at www.facebook.com/mobile.