FB Review

Granted, I get more pokes then the pillsbury doughboy, but alas this review is not about those kinds of pokes.  A while back Facebook introduced a feature called Pokes. It allowed you to ‘poke’ your friends to get their attention. Pokes would appear in the right hand window in a prominent location. You had the option of poking back or remove the poke. It’s a nifty little feature to increase the sociability of the network and was intended to get people talking to each other, but it was very limited in what you can do with it. SuperPoke from Slide Studios is basically the same feature only on steroids. Installing the application will enable you to create much more complex pokes. After installing you can have the option of changing your notice to anything from ‘throw a polar bear at’, ‘make out with’ or my favorite ‘play strip poker with’. So far my attempts to get my friends attention by trying to get them to play strip poker have been futile; I guess I must be losing my sex appeal. Slide has created a very viral and social application here which appeals to wide audiences, and they have also made sure to properly monetize the application. There are Premium Super Pokes (I know, it does sound a bit over the top) which cost gold bars. The premium super pokes are bigger and are animated as opposed to the 16x16px static icons in the regular pokes and cost on average about 10 gold bars. You can purchase the gold bars for about $1.00 for 10 bars, or $4.99 per month for unlimited bars. Slide also claims to offer ‘exclusive premium privileges’ when you sign up to the monthly payment option. The privileges include premium user status and ‘cute premium animals’ – whatever that means. This kind of monetization seems to be a growing trend in the Facebook application development as developers rush to capitalize on their creations. I see nothing wrong in Slide doing that, but if you are going to monetize the application by making some of its feature use on a per-pay basis at least offer some kind of initial trial of the features so that people can try them out before forking over hard-earned dollars. Slide should have thrown in a few free premium pokes and trial access to these so called ‘premium privileges’ for all new users.