Archive for December 6th, 2007

Poke vs. SuperPoke! vs. X Me

Dec 06, 2007 in 3 Stars, Facebook, Just For Fun, Messaging

Poke

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Facebook’s Poke isn’t even considered an application though you’ll find it under all of your friend’s profile pictures. It has only one option: Poke.

Facebook Poke

Nobody really uses it because it’s not worth using.

 

SuperPoke!

Rating: ★★★½☆

SuperPoke! Facebook Application SuperPoke! is an application written to replace Facebook’s Poke.

It has some cool features like “Type Mode” (lets you type your friends names) and “Select Mode” (shows you a list of all your friends).

SuperPoke! Facebook Application Screenshot If you have Top Friends installed, you can “mass SuperPoke!” your top friends with an quick click.

Some of the actions offer additional functionality like the “give flowers” screenshot on the right.

SuperPoke! also lets you disable email notifications in their settings. This is a very nice feature since most apps don’t ask you your preferences and just blast notifications out to you every way possible.

SuperPoke! has 60 actions (and some premium) that come with cute little icons for you to annoy your friends with.

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X Me

Rating: ★★★☆☆

X Me Facebook Application X Me is another Poke replacement.

X Me functions similarly to SuperPoke!. X Me has less default actions compared to SuperPoke!, but they let you type in your own action. So if you wanna knee-bite somebody, you can.

They also let your set your poke as private so it won’t show in your friends mini-feed.

I still don’t like applications that default send to ALL your friends, and this app is one of them. They provide you with an “unselect all” button, but I’d rather have it default to none and give me the option to ‘select all’.

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Summary

I liked SuperPoke! slightly more than X Me, which is why I gave it an extra half star rating. I liked the features it had and also liked that SuperPoke! didn’t default check all my friends. They’re both pretty similar and worth checking out.

Family Tree

Dec 06, 2007 in 3 Stars, Facebook, Just For Fun, Utility

Rating: ★★★☆☆

iFamily_1196839640937

Family Tree by iFamily, Inc. is a native Facebook application for managing your family tree. Family memebers need not have Facebook accounts unlike some other similar apps for Facebook.

Facebook - Family Tree_1196840232078

They offer a simple interface to add family members. As you see, in addition to adding existing Facebook members, you can create placeholders for those that don’t yet have Facebook accounts (seems like everyone will someday!) Every time you add a family member, it sends out a notice to your news feed.

Facebook - Erik Osterman_1196900253435

I did run into a problem, however, after entering in my father using the above form. The Family Tree tab still didn’t recognize that I added my father. I suspect this is because they asked me to enter the relation (free form text) as opposed to selecting the relation from some sort of Drop Down list.

Instead, I should probably have used this form to enter my father, but I don’t see why they have 2 different forms as it leaves room for confusion.

Facebook - Family Tree_1196840360140

My suggestion is that the checkbox “Check here if the relative is deceased” should only display the Death input boxes when checked. Death is such a negative word, the less it appears when talking about family, the better.

Family members you add appear under a the “Family Tree” tab in a nice tree that you can drag around (Flash). You can elect to have 6 of your family members prominently featured on your profile.

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As a bonus, I think it also supports multiple concurrent wives.

There are some more community centric features as well, such as posting family news, browsing family albums, public/private groups for discussion, and a search engine that lets you search for other family members by name and heritage.The application is actively being developed, so expect more features to come. Also, they’re growing incredibly fast so expect some hiccups.

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Facebook Email Notifications Actually Useful Now

Dec 06, 2007 in Facebook

Now for an Important Message

If you haven’t already noticed it appears that Facebook made a minor but significantly useful change to Facebook email notifications today. One that makes them actually useful.

In the olden times, i.e. yesterday, you would get an email notifying you that XXXXX has sent you a message. What you didn’t get was the actual message! Much to the frustration of many of us, you would have to click the link contained in the email just to read the message. Not a very big deal, but if you receive a lot of messages daily it can be rather cumbersome and irritating, especially for those unimportant messages that end up costing you twice as much time.

No Longer Fat Free

After listening to us gripe for the past year Facebook has finally put the meat back in messages. Now when someone sends you a message on Facebook and you receive the email notification it will actually contain the contents of the message. DYJSWITYS?! Yeah — that’s right. The actual message. You still have to log in to reply though. Oh and it works for Wall posts too!

Facebook Email Notifications Now Contain Messages

This is a great enhancement for mobile users too. Now you can stay up to date with your messages via email notifications to your phone.

Thank you Facebook!

IOU

Dec 06, 2007 in 4 Stars, Facebook, Money, Utility

Rating: ★★★★☆

*BANG BANG BANG BANG* and *KKKAAA-CHING* and take their money

Tired of your friends, roommates, co-workers and poker buddies borrowing money from you and not paying you back? $13 for lunch, $20 for dinner, $11 for a movie ticket. They promise to pay you back and even tell you a sad little tale of how they forgot their wallet at home, or were supposed to get paid yesterday but won’t until Monday. If they’re a good friend you probably don’t really mind. You also probably trust them a lot and know they’re good for it. You’ll get your money back for sure — right?

Unless they pay you back within a few days or you’ve loaned them enough cash to put a down payment on a car the chances are that you’re going to forget. If you don’t forget, they will. Or you both will. There’s even a possibility they’ll remember paying you back and you won’t remember that part. Uh-oh.

Before you lose your friends over some petty cash go add IOU to your Facebook profile. IOU by Sanjay Madan, another Harvard Alumni, will keep you from having to bust noses and break legs by keeping both you and your friends up to date on any outstanding financial transactions. Anytime you dole out some money log into Facebook and visit the IOU canvas page where you can enter the date, the amount, borrower’s name, and the reason. If you invite your friend IOU will create a link between both of you and will display to them the shared transaction so they know exactly how much they owe you and why. Once the debt is repaid you can simply clear out the transaction which removes it from both of your profiles.

IOU Ledger

Not only is IOU great for keeping track of the money you’re owed, but it can also help you keep track of the money you owe. If you’re frequently dipping your hands into your friend’s petty cash drawer this is a good way of making sure you maintain that relationship so when you’re down on your luck that register will still be open.

The Result

IOU is an incredibly useful app for Facebook. Not only will your wallet be happier, but IOU will help you keep those Facebook buddies by not letting the bitterness of debt and deceit come between you.

IOU Buddy

The app consists of only two pages, the ledger, and an invite page. It’s easy to use and beautifully designed. It also does not send out pesky and annoying notifications that make your friends secretly hate you. Those Harvard kids really know what they’re doing. For an extra bit of charm there’s also a little icon buddy in the top corner that randomly spits out satirical comments now and then. He’s not very functionally useful, but he takes take the edge off tracking finances a bit.

One thing noticeably lacking from IOU though is the ability to track payments. You can clear a debt in its entirety but there currently is no way to register or track partial payments. IOU is relatively new though and just starting to be published in the Application Directory so perhaps with a little bit of time we’ll see more functionality. Hopefully not at the cost of its simplicity though.

Now I can finally keep track of all those times Erik borrows lunch money.

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What Type of Person do you Attract?

Dec 06, 2007 in 2 Stars, Facebook, Just For Fun

Rating: ★★☆☆☆

What Type of Person do you Attract by Froonie fills you in on the kind of person attracted to you based on your likes and dislikes. Simply fill out 9 questions and it will tell you who you attract.

Facebook - What Type of Person do you Attract-_1196971449926

It turns out, I attract Artsy Fartsy people. Perhaps, but never really dated that many.

Facebook - What Type of Person do you Attract-_1196971138983

Overall, I am disappointed with the app. I expected it to work more like a Hot or Not app, but for characteristics. For example, you would specify if you’re a Nerdy or Artsy person, then view profiles of other members and rank if you find them attractive or not. When you check back after a couple of days, you could then see who finds you attractive. What I like about this idea is there’s nothing overly negative with it. Unlike Hot or Not, where you’re most likely voted ugly, an app of this nature will just give you positive feedback of the types of people you attract. Unfortunately, the app did not work this way, so I find the classifications entirely arbitrary, which isn’t as fun to me.

 

Uninstalled

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