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

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It looks like Facebook has four different pillow fight applications. Though I’m only going to review the one that has 84,635 daily active users. That many users means it’s good, right?

Unfortunately, no. The only thing you can do is invite friends (of course) or throw a pillow at your friends.

Pillow Fight! could have been cool if they did something like display an animation of you getting hit with a pillow or anything at all really.

Sadly, all your friends will get is a bland message like the one below…

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TopNetPix provides a way of efficiently displaying all your favorite links on your profile as a cluster of Favicons. When you click on any one of the icons, it takes you to the site. Another feature is that you can link all social networking profiles to your Facebook profile (e.g. Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Hi5).

The interface is real easy to use. They also provide a lot of preconfigured links like (Google News, CNN, The Onion, etc.).

If this is all it did, I would be happy with the application. The problem is they automatically add 3 of their own links as my favorites. But they aren’t my favorites. What’s worse, they don’t even let me remove them. I really, really don’t like any application misrepresenting my endorsements.

See those first 3 links? I didn’t chose those. More over, I don’t endorse them. Also, I’d love if they got rid of their top banner, which just takes up unnecessary space. If a person likes the app, they can click on the link below the icons.

It looks like this app was just designed to drive traffic to their other properties and not to enhance the Facebook user experience. For this reason, I promptly uninstalled the application.

Uninstalled

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What Type of Person do you Attract by Froonie fills you in on the kind of person attracted to you based on your likes and dislikes. Simply fill out 9 questions and it will tell you who you attract.

It turns out, I attract Artsy Fartsy people. Perhaps, but never really dated that many.

Overall, I am disappointed with the app. I expected it to work more like a Hot or Not app, but for characteristics. For example, you would specify if you’re a Nerdy or Artsy person, then view profiles of other members and rank if you find them attractive or not. When you check back after a couple of days, you could then see who finds you attractive. What I like about this idea is there’s nothing overly negative with it. Unlike Hot or Not, where you’re most likely voted ugly, an app of this nature will just give you positive feedback of the types of people you attract. Unfortunately, the app did not work this way, so I find the classifications entirely arbitrary, which isn’t as fun to me.

Uninstalled

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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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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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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

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WAR is a Facebook implementation of the classic card game of WAR. You probably remember this game from your child hood. It’s about the simplest standard 52-card deck game around.

Classic WAR

In the classic game of WAR the deck is divided evenly amongst each player and then each player draws and flips a card. The player with the highest card wins and gets all of the cards from that hand. In the event of a tie you go to “war”. When you go to war you each place 3 cards face down and flip over a 4th card. The winner of a war gets all of the cards from that hand including the face down ones. In the event of another tie during war, this process is repeated. The player who wins all (or most) of the cards in the end is declared the winner.

Facebook WAR

In the Facebook version of WAR each player is given 5 cards face down. Each player flips their cards over in order, one card per hand. Each player is awarded 2 points for each winning hand per game and 1 bonus point for each game won.

While this sounds like a lot of fun and may bring back childhood nostalgia like wonder, it really isn’t. Either the game of WAR never was fun and we were all just once naive children or this implementation is poorly executed. The main problem with WAR for Facebook is how SLOW it is. Unfortunately each player has to log in and flip their card over manually each hand, one card per hand and then wait for their opponent to log back in and flip their card. Now there is nothing wrong with turn based games, especially casual gaming of Facebook, but usually those games involve some kind of action or entertainment per turn or hand. Logging in to flip a card for a 50/50 chance of winning with no skill at all involved is just not fun.

I had hoped this would be much more exciting, I have fond memories of endless hours of playing WAR as a child but Facebook WAR just does not live up to those expectations. If anyone is friends with the authors; Shashank Senapaty, Matt, and Shrikrishna Shrin please SuperPoke! them and tell them to put the fun back in WAR!

The Result

Uninstalled after the week it took to complete one game.