FBReview.com gets a facelift too
Well, I decided it was time to follow in Facebook’s steps and give FBReview.com a facelift as well. I hope everyone likes the new design; it took a while to set it up so I hope it was worth all the hard work. The new changes should improve navigation as well as make room for new sections on the site. I will be adding a dedicated section specifically geared towards developers with various tools, tips and articles. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to improve things on FBReview.com please let me know.
Whats Your Qizr?
Social networks are all about making connections with people from all over the world, but they can also be good for bragging rights. It seems all the rage these days is showing off how smart you are (what with Who’s Got The Biggest Brain and all). One of the fun things when it comes to Facebook is that all your cerebral glory is documented for all your friends to see. 
If you are like quizzes in general or you like IQ Quiz type of games then you will find Qizr an enjoyable way to spend your time on Facebook. The main idea of this application is for people to upload various images and create a quiz around those images. You can also offer more and more tips and hits on what the answer would be. Users can add hints based on other people’s guesses in real time. This is a really cool concept which I have not seen used this way. I like the fact that people can create their own questions to try and stump their friends.
Another interesting aspect of the Qizr application is regarding the competition between its visitors. Each person can post three guesses until one finally gives the right answer to the question. This way, you can see the answers that the other people gave and compare their answers to yours.
When it comes to posting the quizzes you create on Qizr, you can either allow the access to answer only to some specific groups of friends on Facebook or you can allow anyone to see your question and try to give the correct answer. The answers people provide are posted in real time and so is the correct one so you will have a nice feeling when you will be the first to give the correct answer to a question that you found on Qizr. The diversity of the domains for the questions is unlimited and since questions are constantly uploaded so you will keep on getting an endless stream of questions.
Who DOES Have the Biggest Brain?
That’s a question every one of us always asks. After Einstein that title has been floating around out there with many people owning claim. However, until your last name becomes synonymous with the word genius you can’t really say you have the biggest brain. That is unless you try one of my favorite applications in recent memory is called Who Has the Biggest Brain, from Playfish Studios. Then you may able to call yourself a genius…on Facebook at least.
The application is simply fantastic it is extremely well built and provides for a highly stimulating visual and auditory experience. This is what we have come to expect from Playfish, but in essence this is the game the put them on the map. The goal of the game is to get the most points for solving four types of puzzles, each puzzle type is supposed to test different areas of your cognitive and analytic abilities. I don’t how scientifically accurate that claim is but needless to say the puzzles are still very entertaining, and I know that Quizzes and Puzzles are all the rage these days. 
Of course it wouldn’t be much of challenge if you weren’t timed for each puzzle (1 minute per section). As you do better the questions become harder and harder. Once all four puzzles are completed, the scores are totaled and you get your final score. Playfish always does a good job on the rankings and of course they made no exception here. You can see how you fare up to your friends as well as the rest of world. In addition there are different avatars for various scores. You can also challenge your friends to see if you can brag about how smarter you are.
You can also unlock additional features of the application by ‘going pro’. This enables such options as performance graphs, exclusive taunts and no adverts, of course you have to pay $9.99 to do it. But if you are really into this application it would be well worth it. In another bid to monetize the application Playfish have launched an iPhone/iTouch version which can be downloaded from iTunes. Surprisingly enough Playfish’s business model seems to work much better than others such as Zynga. If you still haven’t added it to your profile, now is the time to do it. Who knows, maybe you have the biggest brain.
Word Addicts
I feel that some applications should come with warnings such as ‘Highly Addictive’, one such application is Wordy from 6Q. If you like competition and think your lexicon is up to par then you’ll want to give Wordy a try but be careful, once you try it once, you’ll want to try it again. This application is actually composed of several mini-games that are in some way related to word play. The application itself is very built with an easy to navigate Flash interface. It includes a single player option or multiplayer (against your friends). You have three choices of games when it comes to playing against others and four different games if you go for single player. All of them can be categorized in two types of games. There are some vocabulary games where you have to link the letters to create as many words as possible and others where you have to arrange the given letters to produce many words before the time runs out. 
All the Wordy games have a time pressure that you will have to deal with. This will only increase the challenge, especially when you go for the multiplayer mode. Even if at first you may find it hard to keep up with the games’ speed you will eventually improve your skills and discover the hidden words faster.
There is also a high scores section for multiplayer. Wordy includes some statistics where you can see how many points you scored. You will also get to see the top players with the best scores. The scores also take into account the single player options and the multiplayer options, rating you according to the games you played.
Wordy has 50k monthly active users so far and the number is continuously increasing. One of the reasons for that is that you have to invite your friends in order to have access to some of this application’s features. The other reason is that these word games are simply too addictive to be able to resist them. Plus, the competition is very important as users get to play with other people in real time. Check your skills when it comes to your vocabulary and play Wordy with your friends.
Facebook Users Can Now Invite Friends to Specific Pages
It appears that sharing page content is quickly becoming centered around the new Stream (for more information on the stream see the previous post about the new Facebook layout). Facebook has also rolled out a new way for people to share pages with friends. You can now “suggest” links to your friends much in the same way you would invite friends to an application. Here is what the invite friends feature looks like on our page.
This should help administrators encourage page users to share the page with their friends. While applications are usually limited to around 10-20 invitations per user per day, there are no restrictions on page invitations. This opens the door to quite of unwelcomed spam like invitations, which will hurt the application developers. I am concerned that sooner or later Facebook is going to have to restrict this feature otherwise users will be inundated with invitations.
