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

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Ayos iShare by Sphorium Technologies provides a file sharing service with unlimited download limits and 500MB of Free Storage. By default, the 500MB is divided into two parts: 100MB of Personal Storage, and 400MB of Shared Storage. How you allocate it is ultimately up to you. But more than just file sharing, it provides extended features like searching your files, tracking revisions, organizing files, and sharing a common work space with your friends. There are tons more features that I left out, which you can view here.

Ayos iShare came at just the right time for me. I have been looking for an unrestricted file sharing program for Facebook. First thing I wanted to do was to upload a file. It took me a few seconds to find the link, it was hidden under “Options”. Personally, since this is a service all about file sharing, I think “Upload File” should be prominently featured.

Uploading a file went smoothly. I would have liked to see some sort eye-candy such as an AJAX indicator and for kicks an upload progress bar.

After uploading, I tried to use the search functionality to find my file. At first, a simple search for a keyword in the description produced no results. After about 1 minute, it did however turn up. I haven’t yet figured out how to view the description, just edit the description. I would prefer if there was some way clicking to get the description of the file inline.

You can also move files around, but I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t create a folder inline as you do with most file explorers.

The business model is straightforward: upsell user on greater storage capacity with a monthly subscription fee starting at $3.99/mo. As much as I like 100% free services, I do support companies rolling out subscription models since in the end the only sustainable business is the one with cash flow.

My overall impression of the app is positive. It works as advertised and is easy to use. There are many more features I didn’t explore, such as the versioning and calendaring system. To be fair to Ayos, it is not just a file sharing application. It’s more of a collaborative content management system for the Facebook platform. My 3 star rating describes its effectiveness as a purely a file sharing application, and doesn’t take into consideration these other features.

I do expect certain usability improvements, however, before I would start using the app regularly. Most of them I’ve already mentioned. As a matter of personal opinion, I’m not a big fan of context menus/drop downs for web apps unless they are used to mimic the behavior of existing, well known applications (e.g. File menu in Windows). I think menus should be used to hide more obscure or advanced features away from regular users, but not used for all features.

In order for a file sharing app in this category to get my vote of 5 stars, it would have to mimic the behavior of a normal file explorer (e.g. Mac Finder or Windows Explorer). This is a reasonable expectation as I’ve seen the functionality implemented with Flash and even AJAX (as in some of the Web OS implementations). My justification for this is users shouldn’t have to learn yet one more interface to accomplish the simple task of file sharing. A file explorer’s interface is intuitive and works.

Update 2007-12-06:

Ayos iShare announced today that they now allow users to collaborate on group items. You can access this feature by clicking on the new tab called Group Items. Down the road, they say to expect a WebDAV capabilities, which will enable you to mount your files locally on your computer.

Installed (for now)

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Doodle Friends is a what you see is what you get kind of application. You select your friends and match them up to pre-drawn doodles. You can create little nicknames for them… and… well, that’s about it.

Doodle Friends is simple and cute — and who doesn’t like simple and cute?

Below are the Doodle Friends I created…

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College Admissions by Max Hodak is designed to facilitate the research process of finding the right university for you. The application clearly has a target audience of US high school students. I’m not sure if the application is US only, but it appears to be that way.

User’s are encouraged to fill out their College CV (Curriculum Vitae). It gives the over achievers some bragging rights amongst their friends, but more importantly to provides the data necessary for the analytics screener to match you up with a college.

Unfortunately, the search functionality is a bit weak. I searched by name for UCLA, University of California Los Angeles, or by location Los Angeles and it returned 0 results. If I just search by state (CA), then UCLA shows up along with every other location that has the string CA. For a site geared towards finding colleges, it seems like the search functionality has been overlooked.

Here is the search for CA.

Clicking on one of the universities, brings up extensive statistics.

For me, the most interesting feature of the application is their Analytics Screener. It lets you systematically search for schools that meet your criteria, such as the U.S. News rankings and acceptance rate. It then pairs it with the information you specified in your profile to come up with scores that describe your chances of acceptance. I think it would be beneficial if there were some sort of legend on the page that described exactly what the statistics mean. In this example, however, it’s not able to provide any useful statistics because I haven’t yet completed my user profile (I can’t remember what my SAT scores were 10 years ago!). I’ll post a screen shot of what they would look like as soon as Max sends one over..

While I like the application’s premise, it’s has a little bit more to go in terms of usability. It’s still in an early beta, so I expect to see more improvements in the near future. Overall, I feel the application is a bit cluttered; it presents too much information on the main page and a lot of unnecessary white space in other places (which is a problem when your on a small 13″ laptop screen). With a slight overhaul such as adding tabs, fixing search, adding more language that better describes the statistics, it would probably meet it’s desired audiences expectations.

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Dolumar is currently in alpha (early development), which means it’s incomplete and may have bugs — which is and does.

Dolumar is definately in the early stages, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth looking at.

In this game you build a kingdom. You build resources and recruit your army (which of course requires more resources).

Dolumar has a great interface. I really like the graphics and the dragable map, though the game is not without it’s faults.

Dolumar is very slow paced — a little too slow.  Ok, paaaaaaiiiiinfully slow. Building a single resource can take up to 3 hours. So click and come back after dinner.

Sending your army out to attack will take 36 hours (yes real life hours, not game hours). But don’t worry, after they attack, it only takes them 18 hours to come back home (if they survive).

What you can build is also pretty limited.  You can build resources (wood, grain, iron, etc.) and recruit infantry, that’s it.

Even though it’s excruciatingly slow, I still enjoy this game. I make my one move a day (which usually takes me less than a minute), then check back tomorrow.

It’s very clear that Dolumar is in alpha, but it’s also clear this game has a lot potential. I’d keep an eye on this one…

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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