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

Rating:

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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Rating:

Social Networking before Social Networks

Before there were social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster we had to network the old fashion way. You know the one I’m talking about, it’s the sole reason you have (or had) a liver. That’s right — it’s time to get our booze on. Now someone pour me another Dark and Stormy!

The Bar|Book for Facebook tries to bring back the good old days by getting us offline and back into the scene. Created by a team of four alcoholic developers, Erik Ober, Will Chu, Paul Kowssari, and Mike Weber, the Bar|Book helps you connect with other Facebook members who are self described regulars at your favorite local bars and clubs.

The Bar|Book has a clean interface that is simple to use and more refined than most Facebook apps. The first thing you do once you install the Bar|Book is set your location if it hasn’t already detected it for you. For me it immediately knew I was in Los Angeles, CA. Once your location is set you can begin browsing bars and clubs in your area. Each listing has a photo and description that you can click for more information or add it to your scenes.

Each scene lets you browse a list of regulars by photo, leave comments, and receive events. It is a great way to keep up with what is happening at your local favorite hot spot. There is also a central news feed that keeps you up to date on other things happening on the Bar|Book, including your friends and what’s hot.

The Result

If you’re heavy into the nightlife the Bar|Book is a great addition to Facebook. You can connect with the regulars from your favorite spots. They’ve recently added a new feature for friend spotting that allows you to keep a history of all the times and places you’ve run into your friends at local watering holes. Just for fun you can send friends virtual drinks, which is similar to some of the other Facebook apps like Booze Mail. The difference being that this is just a feature of the Bar|Book rather than the entire application.

A weakness of the Bar|Book is that there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily track your friends. It would be a lot more useful if they provided a tab with your Facebook friends so you can browse their favorite scenes and coordinate your bar hopping. It is probably less useful for those who don’t live in major metropolitan areas though as the ratio of regulars to population is fairly low. Luckily for me there were already over 3,000 in Los Angeles, and 4,000 in Hollywood at of the time of this review.

Overall I think the Bar|Book is a great application for Facebook because it helps people with a common interest connect both online and offline. That should be the ultimate goal of any social application, to facilitate and enhance human connections.

Installed, see you at The Father’s Office in Santa Monica!