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

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Hangouts by Yelp, is kind of like the eVite of what I’m doing tonight. It’s not for event planning, just for letting your friends know where they can find you, or perhaps where you may find them. You list all your favorite places and record where you’ll be. It’s currently restricted to the US. So far, I’m kind of liking the idea.

After signing in, it puts me in Los Angeles. That’s nice, since Local Picks dropped me off in Boston. I click the button, “Stayin’ Home.” and it posts the following to my profile:

Ok, so now I want to see what my friends are doing. I click on the Friends tabs… and wait a sec. There’s no friends tab. In fact, I can’t even figure out how to determine what my friends are doing without going to my friends profiles or perhaps reading my mini feed.

These aren’t my friends. I don’t know them. I do have a friend or two with the application installed. I’d rather get updated about their status than some random socialites.

Next, I click on one of the hangout spots, “the grove”. I like this place…

Again… no one I know.

Hangouts is not interesting to me. It’s only about meeting people who might like a place that I like, but doesn’t even clearly indicate if they’re going to be there or just like the hangout. It doesn’t make it easier for me to find out what my friends are up to. It seems that just about the only thing remotely useful it does, is to post a story to my mini feed about where I’ll be going, but for that, I’ll just use my Facebook status message.

Some of my minimum expectations for this sort of app:

• I would expect to see a tab of my friends and where they are going.
• I would expect to see a list of my friends favorite places.
• I would expect to be able to invite my friends to go out tonight.
• I would expect to see a history of where my friends have been lately.

Uninstalled

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You remember the old HOTorNOT.com right?  Well if you don’t, you must have been hiding under a rock.

Back in 1999, HOT or NOT was an extremely popular website.  It featured pictures of women and men with a rating scale above their pic — one (not) through ten (hot).

The HOT or NOT App is the same thing but for Facebook users.

You set your preferences (men, women or both) and you’re instantly ready to start dishing out those 1’s and 10’s.

Some things that are neat about this app…

You can see which friends have this app installed (normal) and their rating.

There is a section for the people you rated 10.  You can upload multiple photos.  The app will also tell you which friends of yours rated you.  And you can browse the hotties near to you.  (quite a lot of 9.9’s in Orange County)

In addition to your overall score, this app will also give you a nice graphical breakdown of how many people thought you were HOT and how many people thought you were NOT.

The way their “meet” feature works is pretty neat.  You mark “yes” on them, your picture will show up in their queue and if they mark “yes” on you, you will both be notified.

Some ways this app annoys me…

Every 10 or so pictures you see you will be prompted to invite more friends.  Inviting more friends will get you more votes.  You must also vote to get votes.

You can only meet people through their “meet” system.  They show you pictures, but don’t link to their Facebook profile.  Privacy?  Though smart users stalkers can easily figure out how to contact them as HOT or NOT still exposes their Facebook ID.

My summary

If you’re procrastinating doing those TPS reports, this is a great way to waste a lot of time and possibly meet some hot people.

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What is Crime and Who Commits it?

When I came across this new Facebook application with the daunting name of Crime it immediately caught my attention. Crime by developer Kate Setterfield allows Facebook users to commit acts of virtual crime within Facebook and allow their friends to react to it. Here’s how Kate describes it in the Crime about page.

Ever felt like being a little bit naughty? Or just think that your friends need a bit of punishment?

Crime allows you to use your judgement: deal out what’s appropriate – from stealing your friend’s pencil to hooking up with their mom.

Of course, just trying to commit a crime doesn’t mean it will be successful and your victims will still have the chance to fight you off with pepper spray or to scream for help…

If the idea of stealing virtual possessions of your friends doesn’t make you giddy, maybe the psychology of it all will. I’m sold, time to install!

Wow — so this is the life of crime! The intent is there, now time to choose a victim. Alternatively Crime gives you the option to choose a crime before you choose the victim. If you choose a victim first like I did, then you are given an array of crimes to commit against them. My options were trespass on the property of, forge signature of, kidnap, plastic wrap the toilet of, graffiti the car of, give a wedgie to, or unlock new crimes. As a first time criminal I chose to go with a classic and grafitti my friend’s car. He is going to be soo pissed!

Just before you commit crime gives you a few more options, like adding a comment (pre-meditated) , and a last conscious decision to rethink what you are about to do. But it’s not enough to stop the morally ambiguous, time to start tagging!

That was too easy! But I’m not free yet, Crime not only lets the user commit crime, but also allows the victim to respond. But I’m innocent until proven guilty — right?

Like any good victim hopefully he will just let this crime slide and I will continue my clean record to go on and commit more crimes! At least until someone catches me. After all it’s just a cry for attention — right?

The Result

I don’t care who, I don’t care how, I just need to be bad! Crime lets me do this in a relatively harmless way that turns out to be a lot of good fun. Overall Crime is fun, simple to use, interactive between you and your friends, and keeps you coming back for more. The further you progress the more crimes you can unlock and hopefully avoid a stint in the big house.

Installed — But don’t steal my stuff!

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My Aquarium is a virtual fish tank for Facebook. With a current ranking as the 28th most popular app on Facebook according to Facebook analytics site Adonomics I decided I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Economies of Fish Scales

My Aquarium starts off with a cute and harmless about page that looks like a lot of fun. Once I installed it I was greeted with a box informing me that I currently have 250 coins and can invite up to 20 of my friends in order to earn 25 more coins each. At this point it is apparent that the virtual fish for your virtual aquarium are going to cost me some virtual coins so I click a few faces and rack up some coins.

Once I finishing inviting my friends and have accumulated 850 coins I am taken to the main page which displays my empty aquarium, a box to send a fish to a friend, a button to claim my free 75 coins, and a link to earn 2,500 bonus coins. I quickly click to claim my free 75 coins and am taken to a full page ad promoting another application and message telling me to “Come Back Every Day To Receive Your 75 Bonus Coins”.

How to Hook a Fish

One ad a day for 75 free coins is a fair trade, I guess? But that is just the beginning. At this point I’m thinking well if it was that easy to get 925 coins I might as well go for the 2,500 coins next. When I click on the “Click Here To Get Up To 2,500 More Coins” link I am taken to a page with a list of different lead generation links like this one promising me 2,500 coins, and the chance to win a 42 inch plasma television if I fill out a survey.

Now the red flag warnings are going off in my head. They want me to give up a bunch of personal information to generate a sales lead for something I don’t need for 2,500 virtual coins to buy some virtual fish? No thanks!

I return to the main page ready to buy some fish. I click more links, buttons, and tabs only to see the same pattern repeating, each one wants me to invite more friends, view ads, install other applications, or fill out lead generating surveys. At this point I became very frustrated. All I wanted to do was buy fish to fill my aquarium and I couldn’t find where to do this, all of the links felt very misleading and were quickly losing my trust.

After 5 minutes I finally found how to buy fish, a small link below my aquarium at the bottom of the page said “Send Chad A Fish”. Apparently My Aquarium was designed to keep you in this lead generating circle so the basic core functionality of buying a fish you can’t even do without sending yourself a request from yourself.

Once inside the fish store I browsed through a dozen or more cute cartoon looking fish and other marine animals. Adding fish to your aquarium in the store is as easy as dragging and dropping.

Half the fish though are glittery looking and clicking on these pops up a large dialog telling you that you must install the Webfetti Toolbar in order to view them because “Webfetti holds copyrights to glitter text, profile glitter, and talking smileys.” I am not a lawyer, but how do glitter fish fit into any of those?

I bought a few non-glitter fish, jellyfish, and even a shark (500 coins) just to see how they would look. They bob around in your aquarium adrift joining other fish that your friends have sent you as well.

The Result

The graphics are certainly cute and any fish lover is sure to enjoy them. In the end though My Aquarium has lost all of my trust. It is easy to see how it has become one of the most popular applications on Facebook with such aggressive marketing techniques. It’s also no wonder how My Aquarium developer Greg Thompson is able to generate the $3 per user annually that he claims to.

Having worked for Internet marketing firms in the past though I know all to well how easy it is to mislead and confuse users into an endless circle of lead generating until they have had enough and uninstall your application. My sincere apologies to all of my Facebook friends who I sent invites to. Now excuse me while I go uninstall My Aquarium.

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PhotoPop is a simple and fun application that allows you to add speech and thought bubbles to Facebook pictures.

You can “PhotoPop” any of your Facebook photos or photos of your friends.  The interface is quick and easy to use.

There are a few (minor) things I expected and didn’t see in this application.  I tried to create multiple bubbles on one photo — you can’t.  I couldn’t find a way for a friend to browse the PhotoPop gallery I created — they can only browse what you publish on your profile (which is limited to 4).

Though that’s all minor, and hopefully they’ll add those features soon 😉

It only takes seconds to make your friends look like tards.  This application gets my approval.

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has over 137k daily active users, 22k+ topics in the discussion board and 11k+ reviews. It goes without saying it’s popular… but why?

If you haven’t already installed it, WarBook is a highly addictive multiplayer RPG. WarBook lets you create your Hero from one of 8 classes based on your preferences (attack, defense, magic, money, etc). You earn an hourly salary (seems to be typical for FaceBook games), build your army and attack others. All pretty standard stuff.

The game play is pretty simple and limited in what you can do. You buy more land, earning you more gold… thus allowing you to build your army so you can attack. The game is played with standard html input boxes and buttons. So why am I so addicted?

I’m addicted because of the simplicity. I can log in, spend all my gold, upgrade my kingdom and maybe counter-attack a few people who attacked me, all within 2 minutes… then I’m on my way again checking in on my other Facebook apps or browsing the web.

You accumulate gold hourly, so there’s always a reason to come back in a few more minutes and ruin a few kingdoms.

The game isn’t without a few flaws. It’s full of griefing; you will constantly be attacked by kingdoms 3x the size of yours. Just get used to it, after a while you don’t even notice… and you can always pay someone even bigger or join an alliance to grief them for you 😉

All of those 137k+ users are trying to access WarBook at the same time, so expect a lot of blank pages and errors.

If you try to use their “search” feature to find a kingdom you can attack, you will be extremely disappointed. It has to be the worst search I’ve ever encountered. It’s almost completely worthless. But I guess that can be a good thing, because it’s hard for people to find you!

Attack me if you dare, I’ll put you in my black book 😉

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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