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

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CAZIQUES, QUIXOTRY, BEZIQUE and MUZJIKS. Wait, those are words? Not only are they words but they are the record holding words played for:

• Highest single play (SOWPODS) – CAZIQUES
• Highest single play (OSPD) – QUIXOTRY
• Highest opening move score (SOWPODS) – BEZIQUE
• Highest opening move score possible (OSPD) – MUZJIKS

If you’re wondering what the heck SOWPODS and OSPD are, don’t fret I’ll get to that later. In the mean time if I haven’t destroyed your mind or your ocular sensory and have piqued your interest instead you will now promptly install Scrabulous on Facebook if you haven’t already.

Developed by Jayant Agarwalla and Rajat Agarwalla, Scrabulous (also found at scrabulous.com), for all intents and purposes, is Scrabble©. While its not technically Scrabble© (trademark ™ of Hasbro) it uses Scrabble© rules, official Scrabble© tournament dictionaries and the exact Scrabble© board. How they do it, I don’t know nor do I care, I just want to play.

Scoring and Play

The game uses a points system that combines numerical values assigned to each letter tile as well as point multipliers (2x letter, 2x word, 3x letter, 3x word) arranged throughout the 15×15 grid game board. If you can play all 7 of your tiles in a single turn you are awarded an additional 50 points on top of the word’s normal score! This is commonly referred to as a Bingo.

Scrabulous can be played with a minimum of 2 and maximum of 4 players. To start the game is simple but what lies within the world of Scrabulous is a game of mystery, deceit, trapping, blocking, theft, treachery, defense, offense, and.. The most important aspect, vocabulary! Don’t be fooled by words and words alone, Scrabulous is most definitely a game of strategy.

Words are formed left to right, top to bottom; similar to a crossword puzzle. No diagonal words or backwards spelling allowed, unless of course it’s a palindrome! Each word must consist of a minimum of 2 letters and must appear in the dictionary/wordlist your game is using. On each turn a player can choose to pass, exchange tiles, or play his tiles on the board. Click here for a more detailed explanation on the rules and game play.

Creating/Choosing Games

There are several ways to start games in Scrabulous. You may choose to Create a New game, Host a Table, Join a Table, Browse through your friend list to see who else has it installed or peruse a global directory of Scrabulous players. Regardless of which method you pick all games come with the same options that are chosen on creation.

Opponents aside, you must choose type of Dictionary, Game Type, Game Speed, Requests Limit, Request Duration, and Notes.

Dictionary: English SOWPODS, English TWL, Italian, French. As promised here’s the explanation of SOWPODS and OSPD. Although for Scrabulous the only 2 dictionaries that apply are SOWPODS and TWL.

• SOWPODS – The term was coined to cover the convergence of the two international Scrabble word sources. OSW and OSPD. It is an acronym derived from anagramming OSW and OSPD. Used in tournament Scrabble in all English-speaking countries except North America, Thailand and Israel
• TWL also known as OWL – Official Tournament and Club Word List. This is an expanded version of the OSPD. The words that were included are mostly those which were considered offensive. It is used primarily in North America, Thailand and Israel.
• OSPD – The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, a publication derived primarily from Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, but also includes words from four other major college dictionaries. OSPD is exclusively used in North America, Thailand and Israel
• OSW – The Official Scrabble Words, a publication derived solely from the Chambers Dictionary, published in Scotland, OSW is exclusively used in the UK.

Game Type: Regular or Challenge. A Regular game removes the option to challenge your opponent and instead gives you an automatic word checker that will validate any word played upon submission and reject any word not in the dictionary. There is no penalty for invalid words and the player can continue until a word is accepted. Players may also use the dictionary tool in Regular games. Challenge games afford the players the opportunity to play any letter combination they want leaving the checking up to you. When you do challenge a player you feel is playing a fake or misspelled word, if you are right the player loses his turn and the points from that round. If you are wrong, you lose your turn. Players may not use the dictionary tool in Challenge games.

Game Speed: fast (users are online and want to play), medium (may take a while), and slow (will play whenever I have time).

Request Limit: You may also choose the number of requests the host can receive, for example if you select 3 your game request will expire once 3 challengers have joined your table.

Request Duration: How long your host request is available, anywhere from 15 – 90 minutes.

Notes: (Optional) Anything you want people to see when viewing your listing will appear here.

Features and Tools

Scrabulous comes loaded with built in cheats and tools. Not only can you play a game where the game itself does your spellchecking, you have a built in word list, a tile distribution breakdown, a dictionary lookup, refresh board, move list, delete/resign, and a quick help link.

Word List: A complete 2 letter Word list for both TWL and SOWPODS game play.

Tile Distribution: A complete list of how many tiles per letter exist. Use this to see whats been played and whats still either in your opponents tray or waiting to be picked up.

Dictionary Lookup: Check to see if any word you want to play is valid! This option can only be used in Regular mode, does not function in Challenge mode.

Refresh Board: Refresh the board to see if there is new chat or if your opponent has played.

See Move List: View complete move list history for your game including each turns point total and your overall total.

Delete/Resign: If you don’t want to play a game you can delete or resign. Games with 3 or less moves are deleted and do not show up in your statistics or game history, however if there are 4 or more moves, you will resign and count it as a loss.

Help: Quick links to the game rules, faq, practice mode and feedback

There is also a shuffle button for your tiles, an alphabetical sort button for your tiles, and the ability to spell directly on the board so no drag and drop required. To help with the mathematically impaired, Scrabulous also shows you your score on your current play before you even commit which proves to be incredibly useful for placement comparison.

Under “Completed Games” you can access all your past wins and losses and view the boards as well as the play history per game. Under “My Stats” you can see your rating, how many games you’re playing, how many games you’ve completed, how many games you’ve won, lost, drawn and your best scoring Bingo as well as your Bingo History. If you want to see the overall Leaderboard simply click “Global Stats”. There are a few setting options that you can configure. You can choose to remove your profile from the Scrabulous Users page, select whether or not you want your board by default to show the numbered multipliers, enable a 2 minute auto refresh, and set your default dictionary and game type. If you dont want users to see your online status, not to worry you can adjust that as well.

Cheat Tools?? That’s Crap!

So why play at all? Because its fun! Don’t believe me? Ask the other 544,985 active daily users. There’s a reason why its one of the top performing apps on Facebook! Even with the built in cheats, the game is addictive. Its turn based play allows you to have as many simultaneous games as you choose, at any pace you want. Most importantly Scrabulous educates you. Don’t know the word your opponent just played? I bet you’re going to look it up and use it the next chance you get.

Some users feel the built in tools cheapen the game, but personally I love them. It allows me to be a little more creative in my strategy and encourages me to find new ways to play tricky combos. Unfortunately because it is turn based, with opponents behind a computer and on the internet, cheating is going to occur. While there are numerous Scrabble word builders available online it still doesn’t stop me from playing. The challenge exists regardless of what my opponents may or may not be using, Scrabulous itself challenges me as much as any player does, for every time I play I’m forced to rethink position and strategy to improve my own game. Whether I perform poorly or well, I learn something new every game. And no, for the 100th time, I’m not cheating. I know the word XYSTI because someone kicked my butt with it, and you bet your hiney im jotting down and utilizing words that have decimated my win/loss ratio! If you don’t like to lose and have trust issues, get off the internet.

If you have a Facebook account, you’ve probably noticed the handful of different wall applications. It’s not uncommon to see a handful of them on the same Facebook profile.

Facebook provides you with a wall by default. So what makes these “Super” or “Advanced” walls so “Super” and “Advanced”? Lets take a look…

The Wall

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This is the default wall created by Facebook. By default (unless you removed it), it’s on your profile. The Wall allows you post text, no html or bbc (bulletin board code). You can’t post images or YouTube videos, but you can attach items such as a link and can create a video from your webcam.

Other applications have the ability to tie into The Wall and extend it’s ability. Though, from what I’ve seen, most addons are vampire hugs and other crap you probably don’t care about.

If you like it plain, this is the wall for you.

Super Wall

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This one has to be better, right? It is named Super Wall after all. The 16 million people that have it installed sure seem to think so.

Besides all the features The Wall provides, Super Wall allows you to attach photos, YouTube videos and even music (though you have to install another app to listen to it).

Photos can be added to the wall from your Facebook photo galleries, you can upload, or provide the URL to an image on the web. There’s also an option to draw Graffiti.

Videos can only be attached from YouTube or Google Video, which I guess is ok since everyone uses YouTube anyway.

Though I do have a very serious complaint about this application, which affected it’s rating… This is the spammiest app I’ve encountered on Facebook. I’m beginning to think maybe this app has so many users, not because it’s so great, but because it Super Spams everyone you know.

Upon install, it asked me to invite friends with all of my friends selected by default. Then it added an additional item to my news feed asking people to come and write on my wall.

When I created a test post on my own wall, I accidentally blasted it out to all my friends Super Wall’s. (Everybody is selected by default). In addition to accidentally writing a test message on everybody’s wall, it posted a message in their mini-feed saying they got a new post on their Super Wall.

This means not only did I post on all of my friends’ Super Walls, but all of their friends got messages in their mini-feeds saying I did so. F’n great…

A quick browse of the Super Wall Message Boards will reveal a lot of other users angry at this application. *danger*

Install at your own risk. But if you do install this app… make sure you uncheck the mini-feed option!

Advanced Wall

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The Advanced Wall operates almost exactly like The Wall, but gives you an “Advanced Editor” option. This advanced editor is a WYSIWYG / Rich Text editor. You can change your font, color, height, embed links, emoticons, images, YouTube videos, Flash and even HTML.

You can even import all your posts from your old Facebook wall.

Advanced Wall also lets your friends write private messages on your wall. It is highly configurable and allows you to change a number of settings, like the number of posts on your wall, number of posts per page, a lot of privacy settings and you can even have new post notifications sent via sms to your phone.

If you like the way the original Facebook Wall operates and want a little more functionality, this is a good choice.

• The 12 Walls of Facebook — Part 1
• The 12 Walls of Facebook — Part 2
• The 12 Walls of Facebook — Part 3
• The 12 Walls of Facebook — Part 4

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The My Flickr Facebook App is exactly that. It allows you to show a few pictures from your Flickr account on your Facebook profile page.

The interface is a little crappy looking, but you know what? Who cares! It works and it’s easy! You can show up to 30 pictures in your profile page and select them by tags, date range, etc.

For those of you that have your Flickr photos tagged, this will be super simple. I had to take a few minutes (in Flickr) to tag a few photos I wanted shown.

I really like applications that don’t immediately prompt you to invite all your friends and doesn’t spam the crap out of your feed. My Flickr gives you a checkbox (to publish to the feed) and gives you the control.

My only complaint (preventing a 5 star rating) about this application is that clicking a thumbnail opens a window to Flickr.  I would have liked it to stay in facebook and allow users to comment.

If you have a Flickr account, this app is worth checking out.

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Winning is the Reason for the Season

‘Tis the season for seasonal apps. This past week we’ve seen a slew of new holiday related apps rushing into our Facebook News Feeds faster than you can lick the stripes off a candy cane. All the religious and political debris aside though — who doesn’t love Santa Claus? That’s why this next app got our attention.

The only thing better than getting gifts from Santa Claus is being Santa Claus! Be Santa from the recently founded Dank Apps team gives you just that opportunity. Be Santa lets you play Santa by sending both real and virtual gifts to your Facebook friends with a surprise twist. On Christmas Day of this year random virtual gifts will be selected to be turned into real gifts! Dank Apps is promising to give away $2,500 in virtual-to-real gifts this holiday. Now wouldn’t that make you the joy of all your friends?

All you have to do to send your friends these potentially real gifts is to log in to Be Santa once a day and send gifts or write “letters to Santa” to your friends. You can do each of these up to 20 times a day. For each gift or letter sent you will earn one entry into the virtual-to-real gift giveaway.

When you send a real or virtual gift you enter the name of the product you’d like to send into a simple search box that pops up results from a list of online shopping sites such as Amazon.com. Select the item you were looking for and then send your gift request. You can also choose from a handful of pretty colored gift boxes. I sent my friend Jamie a Sony Blu-Ray Disc Player in a purple gift box since she’s a Sony snob and obsessed with the color purple. If she or I have any sort of luck, she might actually get that Sony Blu-Ray Disc Player this Christmas courtesy of Be Santa!

If you or your friends find out you’ve won this Christmas morning though you won’t be the only ones celebrating. Dank Apps should be partying in style this year with the rampant success of their previous app The Lotto and the recent $250,000 in funding they received from Bay Partners as part of the AppFactory program. Let’s just hope they save some of that money and use it to remove the pop-ups being served through the ads on Be Santa which is my only real complaint so far. Thankfully Firefox minimized the annoyance for me.

The Result

Gifts hand picked, carefully wrapped, and sent! Gleefully awaiting Christmas morning. Keeping it installed, at least until Christmas, when I find out I didn’t win!

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Countdown by Paperade is an application that inserts pretty flash animated countdown timers into your Facebook profile.

Creating one is easy. Select the type of count down, enter the date and select create.

After creating an event, you’re returned to a listing of all your timers.

And publishes a realtime timer to your profile that looks like this..

But I think this default counter looks ugly, so I decided to change the skin. This is easily accomplished by clicking on the link "Change Skin" link.

There are presently about 9 skins to choose from. My favorite is the Digital theme. In addition to adding your own countdowns, you can insert countdowns that other people have created.

Overall, I found the application meets it’s description and provides stylish enough skins that I’ll leave it on my profile.

Installed

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So the latest app to hit my Facebook News Feed is The Brain Game by Fendoo, Ltd. At the rapid pace of these news feeds I’m quickly learning which of my friends are right brained and which are left brained. The Brain Game promises to tell you which side of the brain you use the most by playing this “simple and amazing” game. It also takes the liberty of informing all of your friends of your results.

Brain Surgery

The Brain Game is able to determine this using a completely non-invasive method that is as “simple” as advertised. Without spoiling too much of the fun, the basic premise is that you stare at an animation of a spinning dancer’s silhouette.

Based on the direction she appears to be spinning to you, clockwise or “anti-clockwise” (counter-clockwise), The Brain Game will determine if you are right brained or left brained. It says I am right brained.

The Result

The Brain Game works exactly as advertised. It’s incredibly simple. It only took me 2 minutes from install to results. That includes the bonus brain teaser game they throw in after you get your test results.

Unfortunately for me though the “amazing” part is lacking, mostly because I’ve already seen this optical illusion elsewhere on the Internet. I am also able to change the direction of the dancer at will simply depending on what part of the screen I am looking at. While it is possible that I am whole brained as other test have shown in the past, it is more likely that the science behind this test isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

If you are like me though and enjoy brain teasers you will probably get a couple minutes of fun out of The Brain Game and more fun seeing the results from your friends. You probably won’t keep it installed though since it doesn’t provide any continued value or service.

Uninstalled

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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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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!