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

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My Personality by David Stillwell administers a brief psychological exam that is based off of a real psychological personality questionnaire used in actual scientific research. It offers a brief explanation of your results and allows you to compare your personality to your friends. I answered a minimal amount of questions to get an idea for how it works. You can answer over a hundred questions to get a more accurate psychological profile. As with any app of this nature, treat it truly as Just for Fun. That said, I felt it made a pretty accurate assessment of my personality.

When you’re done, it updates your profile with a nice little graph depicting elements of your personality. I really give them props for not spamming my profile page with unnecessaryily large banners. As their about page states,

MyPersonality is against Facebook spam and does not send any newsfeed stories or notifications without your prior approval. That means no mandatory “invite your friends” pages either!

You’re results are by default public and listed in their public diretory. Privacy settings can be changed to be more restrictive. Not only that, you can delete your personality profile, a feature most apps overlook.

Clicking on the “Compare to Friends” tab reveals my girlfriend is my soul mate! That’s a nice start. They apply a more involved formula for calculating your similarities, so it’s not just based on averages.

What makes this app also useful for dating is they offer a comprehensive personality search engine. You can find personality twins or specify you’re own criteria such as selecting from different personality traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism) or various adjectives like calm, sensitive or reliable (many more). A quick search for my own personality twins pulled up 40 or so in my network.

I had a lot of fun playing with this app and would highly recommend it.

Installed

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Everyone Needs a Hug!

Hugs by Hugsalot Inc (Brett Keintz, Robert Fan, and Dan Ackerman-Greenberg) is about as simple of an application as they get. But that’s the ingeniousness of it. Hugs are universal, and everybody needs a hug now and then. Hugs for Facebook helps deliver those hugs by sending virtual hugs to your friends profiles.

It works like this. Add Hugs to your profile and select the friends you wish to hug from the Hug Friends tab. Click send and voila! That’s the magic of hugs. Anyone can give them. And anyone can use this application.

Hugs goes a little bit further than real hugs though by keeping track of all the hugs you’ve sent, and all the hugs you’ve received. But when it comes to hugs, who’s keeping score anyways? Your friends receive their hugs as requests and others will see who you’ve hugged in your Facebook News Feed. There’s also a profile box that shows how many hugs you’ve received — maybe this is to earn those lonely profiles some sympathy hugs?

The Result

Hugs is a great application for Facebook, it’s so simple everyone can use it, there’s no learning curve to figure out how to hug someone. It’s just human nature. Better yet it won’t lead to any possibly embarrassing situations like the KissMe app that can land you into some steamy trouble if you’ve got a jealous mate. So go brighten someone’s day, or even just your own and give someone a hug! Hug your friends, hug your family, hug your lover, hug your crush, or hug a lot of strangers like the guy in the FREE HUGS campaign video. It doesn’t matter.

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The only problem with Hugs is that you will probably see an “Error while loading page from Hugs” message a lot because too many people are trying to spread the love. I experienced this a lot trying to send hugs. Some people are hug hogs! Just keep re-trying.

Also, can someone please explain to me why Hugs is listed under the Food and Drinks category of the Application Directory? Seriously — wtf?

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iThink by Raymond Rouf, Himanshu Baweja (and 5 other people) polls the world (e.g. Facebook) about their opinions. After completing the polls, you can compare how you voted with your friends or the entire FB community. If that doesn’t get your attention, maybe this will: if you submit the most popular opinion in any 24 hour period you will win $100 USD and 2 other participants selected at random are awarded $50 for agreeing/disagreeing. Not too bad for a few seconds of your day.

Two ways to win: If the opinion you express is voted most popular by the iThink Facebook community in any given 24-hour period, you will be awarded $100. In addition, one lucky winner will be chosen from the pool of everyone who agreed/disagreed with that opinion and awarded $50. Two new winners every day!

Contests start and end every day at 12 midnight GMT (4 pm PDT).

more details…

After installing, just start voting. It’s that easy. How many opinions you chime in on is up to you.

Once you’ve completed and click finish, it prompts you to invite more friends to compare similarities. This is entirely optional. If you want to just cut to the chase, you can click on the “Leaderboard” or “Opinion” links up top. There are also thousands of more opinion polls you can participate in. Each poll has statistics that break down how people voted by demographics such as the age groups and genders.

Each opinion comes with its own Wall where you can discuss the opinion in further detail, maybe even convince others to agree with your stance.

Installed

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Since Flirt Wall and Secret wall are so similar, I decided to write their reviews together…

Both of these walls allow your friends to write anonymously on your wall. They both share a very similar feature set. One wall seems to encourage flirting, while the other just secret posts.

They both require writers to install the wall — which I didn’t like.

No pictures or videos on either wall.

Flirt Wall has a few extra features like private posts (invisible to everybody but you), it will show your sent flirts, and you can view your friends flirt walls.

Well, these walls aren’t a replacement for the wall you currently are using, but if you want your friends to flirt or write anonymous message to you, they’re worth checking out.

Crap Wall

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Crap Wall is just like your favourite wall application, but without any of the functionality.

Things you can’t do:

• Leave messages on a friends wall
• Share videos
• Spam the newsfeeds of yourself and your friends
• Anything at all, except look at the wall
• New! You can now write on your own wall. But it’s still crap!

Crap wall is obviously a joke. It’s kinda funny.

Summary

Well, I reviewed quite a few walls over the past few days. We’ve seen some good and we’ve seen some bad. If you’re looking for a replacement for the default wall facebook provides, you should check out either Fun Wall or Advanced Wall. I liked both of these, but ended up going with Fun Wall.

The downside to replacing your default wall, is you’ll no longer see your default wall (and all the comments) or you will have two (or more) walls.

Also, when your friends try to write on your wall, they will be prompted to login — unless they also have the wall installed. This can be annoying, but I’m pretty sure all Facebook users are used to seeing the login box by now.

• 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

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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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.