What Apps - Reviews and profiles of social applications for Facebook, MySpace, and more.

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It’s that time of year again where everything starts to turn powder white and freeze over, unless of course you’re like me and live in the ever green state of California. So while the rest of you are outdoors throwing real snowballs at each other, the best I can do is retaliate with virtual ones on Facebook.

Snowball Fight is a fun, if not pointless, game of throwing snowballs at friends on Facebook. Brought to us by smashCard who apparently makes a few other applications as you’ll quickly find out if you install Snowball Fight.

The concept is simple. You install Snowball Fight, select your friends who you want to hit, and they receive a ‘hit’ as a Facebook request. If they accept the request and install Snowball Fight they will be greeted with a short but cute animation of a boy hurling a snowball into their screen. Simple, cute, fun, and stings a lot less than the real ones.

Users have the option of logging back into Snowball Fight at any time to view their current stats, outstanding fights, and retaliate against friends. The game doesn’t go much beyond that. It really is just the simple act of hurling snowballs (Facebook requests) back and forth at each other. As a purely seasonal activity though you don’t expect much more from this than a simple kid friendly gesture of a good snowball in the face, like a tongue-in-check nudge or a poke.

The Result

Installed it, had some fun, uninstalled

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WAR is a Facebook implementation of the classic card game of WAR. You probably remember this game from your child hood. It’s about the simplest standard 52-card deck game around.

Classic WAR

In the classic game of WAR the deck is divided evenly amongst each player and then each player draws and flips a card. The player with the highest card wins and gets all of the cards from that hand. In the event of a tie you go to “war”. When you go to war you each place 3 cards face down and flip over a 4th card. The winner of a war gets all of the cards from that hand including the face down ones. In the event of another tie during war, this process is repeated. The player who wins all (or most) of the cards in the end is declared the winner.

Facebook WAR

In the Facebook version of WAR each player is given 5 cards face down. Each player flips their cards over in order, one card per hand. Each player is awarded 2 points for each winning hand per game and 1 bonus point for each game won.

While this sounds like a lot of fun and may bring back childhood nostalgia like wonder, it really isn’t. Either the game of WAR never was fun and we were all just once naive children or this implementation is poorly executed. The main problem with WAR for Facebook is how SLOW it is. Unfortunately each player has to log in and flip their card over manually each hand, one card per hand and then wait for their opponent to log back in and flip their card. Now there is nothing wrong with turn based games, especially casual gaming of Facebook, but usually those games involve some kind of action or entertainment per turn or hand. Logging in to flip a card for a 50/50 chance of winning with no skill at all involved is just not fun.

I had hoped this would be much more exciting, I have fond memories of endless hours of playing WAR as a child but Facebook WAR just does not live up to those expectations. If anyone is friends with the authors; Shashank Senapaty, Matt, and Shrikrishna Shrin please SuperPoke! them and tell them to put the fun back in WAR!

The Result

Uninstalled after the week it took to complete one game.

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The Know Me Well Facebook application written by Chris Sim works like those the chain-mail personality quizzes you’ve been getting in your inbox for the last 10 years.

After installing the application, you’re prompted to fill out some simple yes/no questions. How many you answer is up to you, but you need to submit at least 20 answers.

After you are done submitting your answers, you are given the chance to test your knowledge of your friends. There are some questions you could possibly never know the answer too, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use your intuition.

I like the application. It’s easy to use and intuitive. I would have given it 4 stars, if it had different question profiles on specific topics (like some other similar apps). But even with just 200 questions, getting high scores is a lot harder than you might think.

Installed

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As someone who’s notoriously bad at dates, I thought I’d give the Birthday Calendar application a shot.

After installing the application, I was worried that I would need to invite all my friends to use the application in order to derive any usefulness from it. That was not the case! You can simply skip this step and immediately get a calendar view of all your friends birthdays.

Note, it was recently my birthday and gifts are still being accepted.

Clicking on a person’s profile picture opens up a new page which lets you send birthday greeting cards. The catch is, they are not sent on the Facebook platform, but instead link to http://www.birthdays-calendar.com/. These greeting cards are actually sent via the mail, so there’s a fee associated with sending a greeting card.

The other semi-useful feature of the application is to send alerts. Using the Facebook API they can notify you of up to 20 birthdays per day (Limited by the Facebook API). The catch is it forces your friends to add the application in order for you to receive the alerts (the viral component).

Overall, it’s an application I’ll keep installed. The birthday overview calendar provides enough usefulness. I don’t think I’ll fall for their upsell strategy, but they provide quick links to Facebook gift giving options as well.

Installed

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Yes — that’s right, the answer to life’s looming question is finally here! Which Olsen Twin Are You? is the Facebook application designed to help you sleep at night by riding your subconscious of this burning question. Brought to us by the minds of Katherine Barscay and Tomas Lin.

Mary-Kate or Ashley?

Which Olsen Twin Are You? presents you with two columns of choices that you are to choose your favorite from for each row. There’s about 10 questions in total. Based on your answers it then proceeds to tell you which Olsen twin you are. My results: Ashley.

Katherine and Tomas claim this app was inspired by the following video. Does Facebook need applications like this? You decide.

[[yt:ecybaR_Th5o]]

The Result

After spending about 1-2 minutes installing this application and answering the questions to have the answer revealed to me I can honestly say I will no longer wonder which Olsen Twin I am. So what’s the point of having this in my profile box?

Uninstalled

Welcome to What Apps. What Apps is a blog dedicated to reviewing and profiling applications built for your favorite social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Our goal is to help you decide what apps are worth installing.

We will be reviewing old and new applications to provide insight into current trends and uncover hidden gems. We’ll also tell the stories of the people behind the scenes who make the apps, what motivates them, where they find their inspiration, and of their successes and failures. But ultimately, we’ll tell you if we left each app installed or if we clicked uninstall.

If you have discovered or developed an application for Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, etc.) and would like to see it reviewed here please feel free to submit your story to us. We can’t guarantee we’ll like it, or even review it, but we do promise to read it.