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

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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.