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

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Friendly Search by Heiko Waechter and Jason Smale aims to improve the way you manage all your existing friends by filtering, sorting and searching. It’s not an improved Friend Finder application, as one might interpret their description.

Immediately after signing in, I’m impressed with its clean presentation. The application is designed in Flash, with a little bit of little eye-candy like fading and flashing. Everything is accomplished on a single page with no page reloading.

Features:

1. Sort by
   1. First Name
   2. Last Name
2. Filter by Network
   1. Drop down list of all your networks and your friends’ networks
3. Filter by Country
   1. Drop down list all distinct countries in your network of friends
4. Filter by Sex
   1. Male
   2. Female
   3. All
5. Search by Name
6. View Mode
   1. Small icons
   2. Medium icons
   3. Medium icons with details

I’m going to keep the application installed. In all honesty, even the existing Facebook Friend List feature is one I use irregularly, but next time I need to lookup one of my friends I’ll probably use Friendly Search.

Installed

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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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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PhotoPop is a simple and fun application that allows you to add speech and thought bubbles to Facebook pictures.

You can “PhotoPop” any of your Facebook photos or photos of your friends.  The interface is quick and easy to use.

There are a few (minor) things I expected and didn’t see in this application.  I tried to create multiple bubbles on one photo — you can’t.  I couldn’t find a way for a friend to browse the PhotoPop gallery I created — they can only browse what you publish on your profile (which is limited to 4).

Though that’s all minor, and hopefully they’ll add those features soon 😉

It only takes seconds to make your friends look like tards.  This application gets my approval.