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

Rating:

Rating:

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.

Rating:

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.

Rating:

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 😉

Rating:

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

Rating:

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.

Rating:

The Know Me Well Facebook application written by Chris Sim works like those the chain-mail personality quizzes you’ve been getting in your inbox for the last 10 years.

After installing the application, you’re prompted to fill out some simple yes/no questions. How many you answer is up to you, but you need to submit at least 20 answers.

After you are done submitting your answers, you are given the chance to test your knowledge of your friends. There are some questions you could possibly never know the answer too, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use your intuition.

I like the application. It’s easy to use and intuitive. I would have given it 4 stars, if it had different question profiles on specific topics (like some other similar apps). But even with just 200 questions, getting high scores is a lot harder than you might think.

Installed

Rating:

As someone who’s notoriously bad at dates, I thought I’d give the Birthday Calendar application a shot.

After installing the application, I was worried that I would need to invite all my friends to use the application in order to derive any usefulness from it. That was not the case! You can simply skip this step and immediately get a calendar view of all your friends birthdays.

Note, it was recently my birthday and gifts are still being accepted.

Clicking on a person’s profile picture opens up a new page which lets you send birthday greeting cards. The catch is, they are not sent on the Facebook platform, but instead link to http://www.birthdays-calendar.com/. These greeting cards are actually sent via the mail, so there’s a fee associated with sending a greeting card.

The other semi-useful feature of the application is to send alerts. Using the Facebook API they can notify you of up to 20 birthdays per day (Limited by the Facebook API). The catch is it forces your friends to add the application in order for you to receive the alerts (the viral component).

Overall, it’s an application I’ll keep installed. The birthday overview calendar provides enough usefulness. I don’t think I’ll fall for their upsell strategy, but they provide quick links to Facebook gift giving options as well.

Installed

Rating:

Yes — that’s right, the answer to life’s looming question is finally here! Which Olsen Twin Are You? is the Facebook application designed to help you sleep at night by riding your subconscious of this burning question. Brought to us by the minds of Katherine Barscay and Tomas Lin.

Mary-Kate or Ashley?

Which Olsen Twin Are You? presents you with two columns of choices that you are to choose your favorite from for each row. There’s about 10 questions in total. Based on your answers it then proceeds to tell you which Olsen twin you are. My results: Ashley.

Katherine and Tomas claim this app was inspired by the following video. Does Facebook need applications like this? You decide.

[[yt:ecybaR_Th5o]]

The Result

After spending about 1-2 minutes installing this application and answering the questions to have the answer revealed to me I can honestly say I will no longer wonder which Olsen Twin I am. So what’s the point of having this in my profile box?

Uninstalled

Welcome to What Apps. What Apps is a blog dedicated to reviewing and profiling applications built for your favorite social networks like Facebook and MySpace. Our goal is to help you decide what apps are worth installing.

We will be reviewing old and new applications to provide insight into current trends and uncover hidden gems. We’ll also tell the stories of the people behind the scenes who make the apps, what motivates them, where they find their inspiration, and of their successes and failures. But ultimately, we’ll tell you if we left each app installed or if we clicked uninstall.

If you have discovered or developed an application for Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, etc.) and would like to see it reviewed here please feel free to submit your story to us. We can’t guarantee we’ll like it, or even review it, but we do promise to read it.