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

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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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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!

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My Aquarium is a virtual fish tank for Facebook. With a current ranking as the 28th most popular app on Facebook according to Facebook analytics site Adonomics I decided I had to see what all the fuss was about.

Economies of Fish Scales

My Aquarium starts off with a cute and harmless about page that looks like a lot of fun. Once I installed it I was greeted with a box informing me that I currently have 250 coins and can invite up to 20 of my friends in order to earn 25 more coins each. At this point it is apparent that the virtual fish for your virtual aquarium are going to cost me some virtual coins so I click a few faces and rack up some coins.

Once I finishing inviting my friends and have accumulated 850 coins I am taken to the main page which displays my empty aquarium, a box to send a fish to a friend, a button to claim my free 75 coins, and a link to earn 2,500 bonus coins. I quickly click to claim my free 75 coins and am taken to a full page ad promoting another application and message telling me to “Come Back Every Day To Receive Your 75 Bonus Coins”.

How to Hook a Fish

One ad a day for 75 free coins is a fair trade, I guess? But that is just the beginning. At this point I’m thinking well if it was that easy to get 925 coins I might as well go for the 2,500 coins next. When I click on the “Click Here To Get Up To 2,500 More Coins” link I am taken to a page with a list of different lead generation links like this one promising me 2,500 coins, and the chance to win a 42 inch plasma television if I fill out a survey.

Now the red flag warnings are going off in my head. They want me to give up a bunch of personal information to generate a sales lead for something I don’t need for 2,500 virtual coins to buy some virtual fish? No thanks!

I return to the main page ready to buy some fish. I click more links, buttons, and tabs only to see the same pattern repeating, each one wants me to invite more friends, view ads, install other applications, or fill out lead generating surveys. At this point I became very frustrated. All I wanted to do was buy fish to fill my aquarium and I couldn’t find where to do this, all of the links felt very misleading and were quickly losing my trust.

After 5 minutes I finally found how to buy fish, a small link below my aquarium at the bottom of the page said “Send Chad A Fish”. Apparently My Aquarium was designed to keep you in this lead generating circle so the basic core functionality of buying a fish you can’t even do without sending yourself a request from yourself.

Once inside the fish store I browsed through a dozen or more cute cartoon looking fish and other marine animals. Adding fish to your aquarium in the store is as easy as dragging and dropping.

Half the fish though are glittery looking and clicking on these pops up a large dialog telling you that you must install the Webfetti Toolbar in order to view them because “Webfetti holds copyrights to glitter text, profile glitter, and talking smileys.” I am not a lawyer, but how do glitter fish fit into any of those?

I bought a few non-glitter fish, jellyfish, and even a shark (500 coins) just to see how they would look. They bob around in your aquarium adrift joining other fish that your friends have sent you as well.

The Result

The graphics are certainly cute and any fish lover is sure to enjoy them. In the end though My Aquarium has lost all of my trust. It is easy to see how it has become one of the most popular applications on Facebook with such aggressive marketing techniques. It’s also no wonder how My Aquarium developer Greg Thompson is able to generate the $3 per user annually that he claims to.

Having worked for Internet marketing firms in the past though I know all to well how easy it is to mislead and confuse users into an endless circle of lead generating until they have had enough and uninstall your application. My sincere apologies to all of my Facebook friends who I sent invites to. Now excuse me while I go uninstall My Aquarium.

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has over 137k daily active users, 22k+ topics in the discussion board and 11k+ reviews. It goes without saying it’s popular… but why?

If you haven’t already installed it, WarBook is a highly addictive multiplayer RPG. WarBook lets you create your Hero from one of 8 classes based on your preferences (attack, defense, magic, money, etc). You earn an hourly salary (seems to be typical for FaceBook games), build your army and attack others. All pretty standard stuff.

The game play is pretty simple and limited in what you can do. You buy more land, earning you more gold… thus allowing you to build your army so you can attack. The game is played with standard html input boxes and buttons. So why am I so addicted?

I’m addicted because of the simplicity. I can log in, spend all my gold, upgrade my kingdom and maybe counter-attack a few people who attacked me, all within 2 minutes… then I’m on my way again checking in on my other Facebook apps or browsing the web.

You accumulate gold hourly, so there’s always a reason to come back in a few more minutes and ruin a few kingdoms.

The game isn’t without a few flaws. It’s full of griefing; you will constantly be attacked by kingdoms 3x the size of yours. Just get used to it, after a while you don’t even notice… and you can always pay someone even bigger or join an alliance to grief them for you 😉

All of those 137k+ users are trying to access WarBook at the same time, so expect a lot of blank pages and errors.

If you try to use their “search” feature to find a kingdom you can attack, you will be extremely disappointed. It has to be the worst search I’ve ever encountered. It’s almost completely worthless. But I guess that can be a good thing, because it’s hard for people to find you!

Attack me if you dare, I’ll put you in my black book 😉

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It’s that time of year again where everything starts to turn powder white and freeze over, unless of course you’re like me and live in the ever green state of California. So while the rest of you are outdoors throwing real snowballs at each other, the best I can do is retaliate with virtual ones on Facebook.

Snowball Fight is a fun, if not pointless, game of throwing snowballs at friends on Facebook. Brought to us by smashCard who apparently makes a few other applications as you’ll quickly find out if you install Snowball Fight.

The concept is simple. You install Snowball Fight, select your friends who you want to hit, and they receive a ‘hit’ as a Facebook request. If they accept the request and install Snowball Fight they will be greeted with a short but cute animation of a boy hurling a snowball into their screen. Simple, cute, fun, and stings a lot less than the real ones.

Users have the option of logging back into Snowball Fight at any time to view their current stats, outstanding fights, and retaliate against friends. The game doesn’t go much beyond that. It really is just the simple act of hurling snowballs (Facebook requests) back and forth at each other. As a purely seasonal activity though you don’t expect much more from this than a simple kid friendly gesture of a good snowball in the face, like a tongue-in-check nudge or a poke.

The Result

Installed it, had some fun, uninstalled