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.

Thank god for the fresh powder we got this winter, because if there’s anything good that comes out of a cold snowy winter is Skiing and Hockey.  Unfortunately for me the Maple Leafs stink, so that pretty much leaves me skiing.   I was glad to find an application called MySnowBuddy, which is designed to cater to people who love the mountains and practice winter sports.

MySnowBuddy is the easiest way for those who love skiing or snowboarding to connect with one each other and share their experiences, their likes and dislikes. Once you join this application you will have to complete a short questionnaire related to what types of sports you like and other characteristics that will help you and others to connect. This is a great way to coordinate meetings in specific locations with new people who love the slopes as much as we do.

An interesting thing is that the application offers you information about the local mountains in Western Canada, such as where to go and info related to the weather conditions. For the moment, it includes information related to Hemlock, Whistler, Cypress, Grouse and Seymour.  This application should really come in handy come the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  You’ll be able to easily find people who are going to the same events as you.

Another great feature is that you will be able to participate at ride share. The advantages are that you can either organize yourself a ride or invite others to join or you can take part at a ride share that someone else planned. You will be able to post or read information regarding the costs and the location and choose the suggestion that fits you best. Not only that you will find many options to choose from and meet new people but you will also get the chance to promote the reduction of emissions and a healthy lifestyle.

Furthermore the application offers a sort of equipment marketplace where you can buy or sell winter gear.  Users can post their own gear for sale so if you want to upgrade your current equipment this application is a great place to start.

One of the newer applications that can be found and used on Facebook is Sam’s Fish Bowl, a game that allows you to create a virtual pet fish and take care of it. Let’s take a deeper look inside this game and see what it has to offer. My 8 year old nephew simply loves this game so I decided it warranted a review on the site.

Sam’s Fish Bowl was created by the producers of Sam’s Interactive Reader software, Storybook Anytime. While this is software meant for children between three and nine years, Sam’s Fish Bowl has a wider audience on Facebook. Once you make your account, you will be able to create your own fish in any unique way, from its color to its personality. By using the customizing function, you will be able to search through a variety of options when it comes to the bowl décor as well as to the fish itself. It can have diverse fun colors and its own temperament as well as favorite types of food and an unique abilities. From aspect, you can enjoy choosing between an expert ninja fish, a sumo wrestler, as well as a fish with telekinetic abilities or one that has x-ray vision.

Sams Fish Bowl

Regarding feeding the fish, you will only get to give him food once a day. However, the game allows you to involve your friends in raising the fish as well as they can help you feeding yours. You only have to invite your friends and they will also feed your fish daily. Your fish’s health is reduced by five percent everyday unless you feed it but each of your friends that feed it too will provide the fish with an extra two percent growth of health.

In what concerns the points or Super Feeder Points, as the creators call them, you can check the leader board. Here you will be able to see who the top players in the game are and how many points they have. You will also be able to see your own ranking. Plus, if you have an account for your child on the Sam’s Interactive Reader, then you will share your feeder points with his or her Super Reader Points and you will both have fun and help each other in earning more points.

From January to February the number of the active users that Sam’s Fish Bowl application has increased from around 2000 to approximately 4000. Use this game together with your children and friends as well and enjoy a nice time by taking care of your unique fish.

Finally a game that combines 2 things I really like Golf and Partying, although, not a good combination at the same time, unless you want to get kicked off the Green.  Minigolf Party, is the latest title from Playfish games. Minigolf Party has been introduced fairly recently by Playfish and already has about 2.5 million Monthly Active Users, which makes it one of the most popular new titles on Facebook. The game features the familiar Playfish flash graphics (although the avatars have huge bobble heads for some reason) and game play is also fairly advanced.  You can see from the embedded video below that Playfish really invested in the flash environment and character responsiveness.

Overall the game is a lot of fun to play, however I’m sure Playfish will be tweaking it as it matures.  Mini Golf Party also includes a challenge feature which works much like the Bowling Buddies challenge.  I reckon they used the same application code for this.  The challenge works by selecting a friend to challenge and then playing a round to set your score.  If your friend accepts the challenge he play the same round and the winner will be decided by the best score.

The recent article on the YoVille monetization debacle has led me to write a follow up article on the state of Facebook applications and customer service offered by their developers. As a result of monetization efforts by developers a key aspect has been overlooked, namely customer service to application users. There are currently two popular monetization methods in addition to traditional advertising such as banners and they are: Incentive based advertising and outright feature purchases.

Incentive based advertising is when a developer provides advertising offers to users and in exchange for clicking on the offers the user is rewards with points or virtual cash. For example clicking on a specific offer will give you extra bonus points which you exchange for items or features within the application that would not be available to other users.

Outright feature purchases is when the developer offers the user to buy the virtual points or items outright using a credit card or a PayPal account.

These two monetization aspects raise a very important question. If someone pays for a service, aren’t they entitled to some kind of customer service when something goes wrong?

In the rush to monetize their applications many developers have overlooked this critical point. In most application (most, but not all) developers provide little or no support. Case in point is Zynga who have recieved very negative feedback from their users when they launched their YoCash program. But Zynga is not alone in this aspect, as it appears that most developers are following in the same pattern. Either that, or they have simply been overwhelmed with requests for support that they simply lack the facilities to accommodate all the users. For example take a medium to high usage application with about 3 million monthly active users. Lets assume that only about 5% of those are paying users. That translates to about 150k paying customers, of those about 10% have some kind of issue (whether it is technical or otherwise). That means a developer need to service about 15k requests per month. If the developer is unable to provide support the result is a terrible backlog of customer service requests, and a lot of unhappy customers.

I believe that Facebook must intervene here and ensure that developers provide adequate  customer service facilities.  If developers are taking money from Facebook users, some of the responsibility for customer care falls indirectly on Facebook.  There are many ways to provide cost effective customer service but since developers are not obligated to do so, they simply ignore this all together.  Facebook must realize that it is in its best interest to keep its users happy and that providing customer care facilities should be a requirement to launching an application on Facebook, otherwise alienated users will eventually turn to stand-alone social games with far better customer care then what is provide on Facebook.

Yo Yo, why go to the gym in reality when you get all the exercise you want with your virtual avatar.  This approach perfectly suits a massive couch potato such as myself. YoVille is the Sims meet Facebook. A virtual world on Facebook where you can do pretty much anything, go to the virtual casino, visit a virtual bank and even see a virtual florist. YoVille is one of the most popular applications on Facebook made by Zynga Games. The game itself is extremely well developed with a highly responsive virtual environment which makes the virtual world of YoVille very easy to navigate and to play the game.  Overall the application is very advanced in terms of visual interface compared to other games on Facebook.  Most games are textual and only a few utilize flash graphics and elements to the extent that YoVille does.  You can stroll around YoVille at will and chat to other players in the game.  You can invite them to participate in various activities and even throw snowballs at people.

However, not all is well in YoVille, the game has been under heavy criticism lately with some members even starting a petition against the use of the application.  The cause for this member backlash is the way Zynga has monetized the game.  Essentially there is 2 types of currencies: YoCoins and YoCash. The catch is that some ‘premium’ items such as pets, gadgets and others can only be bought with YoCash which can only be obtained by paying Zynga with real money using your credit card or paypal.  Although YoCoins can also be paid for you can earn them by playing the application.  YoCoins can be baught at 5,000 YoCoins for $10 and YoCash can be baught at 25 YoCash for $5.00.  Many members who saved up many coins by inviting others and participating in the gameplay since the application was launched were left out in the cold when Zynga introduced the new monetization procedures.  As a result many players have left the application and now feel betrayed.  There have been several groups who even called for a general YoVille blackout day on January 16th. Although I can understand Zynga’s point of view (it takes a lot of resources and investment to develop an application like YoVille) they simply wanted to monetize the application.  But if anywhere is there a case for how to totally botch the monetization process look no further than YoVille.  Zynga has taught many application developers an important lesson in how to NOT monetize your application properly and in the process alienate a large portion of your users.  In the monetization process Zynga has overlooked a key aspect of user retention and essentially certain aspects of the game are now pay only with no other recourse for non-paying users.   Regardless of the new monetization process the application has been steadily growing and according to appdata.com it currently holds 3.2 million active monthly users.  Although the game itself is simply fantastic I feel that the monetization of the application takes it down a notch.

Long long ago, in a galaxy far far away, a stock market is actually going up, unlike here on Earth, where the stock market has been on a downward spiral.  A new application on Facebook aims to change the way people invest their money.  The application is called Stock Wars from Black Swan Games.  It is a virtual market simulation and portfolio management with a highly addictive social element.  Here is how the game works.  The goal of the game is to be the top investor on Facebook.  The application gathers actual market data and integrates it into the application. When you join Stock Wars you are given $100,000 in virtual cash.  You can then use that virtual cash to purchase exchange trade stocks like Google (ticker symbol GOOG) or any other traded company.  For example Google is currently trading at about $300 on the NASDAQ, so you can use some or all of your virtual cash balance to buy Google shares and then hopefully sell them at a higher price.  As your portfolio increase or decrease your profile is given a designation such as a ‘hedge fund manager’ or ‘day trader’.  What I found interesting in the application is the fact that it teaches you how to invest without actually putting any real money into the market. If there is a stock that you have been looking at you can buy it on Stock Wars and then track its progress without spending a penny.  Another feature of the application is the challenge option.  You can challenge your friends to see if you can invest better than them.  The challenge work when each player agrees to a specific wager (up to $5,000 in virtual dollars) and a pre-defined period of time.  The winner is determined by the player who has the largest portfolio gain.  For example I wagered $1,000 with my friend Andrew, that my portfolio will increase more (in %) in the next month.  If I win I get Andrew’s $1,000 added to my overall balance for me to invest in more stocks.  Gordon Gecko would be proud!  You can also add to your cash balance by trying out some offers the app developers include in the application.  For example clicking on an offer will increase your virtual cash balance by $1,000.  You can then use that cash to buy more stocks.  The game itself is very educational, although I wish the developers include a detailed tutorial for less knowledgeable users, after all investing in stocks can be tricky.   Overall, I think this application is fantastic, although still in the embryonic stages of growth, I believe it has tremendous potential.  Look out for this one to be a big hit on Facebook.  In fact, I liked this application so much, I put it in our featured application section.

UPDATE: I have spoken with the developers at Black Swan Games and was informed that they are launching a tutorial section sometime this week.  They also mentioned that there will be a slew of new features being deployed this month, although they did not go into specific details.  I will update the post once I get a chance to see what they are.

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Say hello to muh little friend.  Mob Wars is a text based social gangster game.  The goal of the game is to create your own powerful mob and become the top mobster on Facebook.  Being a big fan of the Sopranos I had high hopes when I first joined the application.  You start the game with $4,000 in cash, 100 health, 10 energy, 3 Stamina and 0 experience.  When you first join the application you are presented with a list of options in the main menu.  These include the following:

The Job List      (Make some fast money and gain experience.)
The City     (Claim control of the city to earn recurring income.)
The Bank     (Safehouse your earnings here, but for a fee.)
The Godfather     (Help The Godfather, earn big rewards in return.)
Fight Now     (Attack and rob rival mobsters.)
My Stockpile     (Equip your mob with weapons, vehicles, and gadgets.)
My Mob     (Expand your mob to become more powerful.)
My Profile     (View and level-up your character.)
Made Men     (Pay your respects to the top mobsters on Mob Wars.)

The Job List is your primary source to gain money and experience points.  An example of ‘jobs’ includes muggings, burglaries and liquor store holdups.  New jobs are unlocked as your experience grows (you can’t expect to pull off a bank heist on your first day as a gangster).  However, actually doing the job is rather lame, there is a button that simply says ‘Do Job’.  Granted each job has various requirements such as Energy and various weapons.  After you ‘do’ the job you gain money and experience and your energy is replenished with time (there is a small countdown clock under the energy status).   The game is surprisingly complex, you can buy properties in the City tab which generate income for you or you can go to the bank to stash your loot.   Also no gangster game would be complete without the Godfather, and Mob Wars is no exception.  The Godfather section is an avenue for the developers to monetize the application.  You are given ’10 favor points’ when you start the game and you can go to the Godfather to trade your favor points for various game elements such as weapons, health, energy and even mob members.   You can either buy favor points outright via PayPal for 4 favor points for a $1.00 or you can click various advertisements to gain favor points as well.   Another feature of the application is the Fight section where you can attack other players.  The application provides a list of players of similar level and experience attributes and is a good way to gain experience points quickly (assuming you win the fight).  The action mechanism is also lame as it is similar to doing a job in that you simply have a button that say ‘attack’.  In my opinion I think it would be more interesting if the developers perhaps included some kind of quick flash mini-game where you actually fight another mobster.  All in all it is a very engaging and extremely fun to play and explore the feature-rich application

I live in Toronto, and if only the Maple Leafs would start winning hockey games all would be well.  Unfortunately the Maple Leafs stink worse than a used jock strap, but I digress.  Fed up with your city like me?  Just build your own city using the My City application, Developed by Flavien Charlon, a Microsoft employee from Ireland.  My City is a social adaptation of the good ol’ Sim City game series, you can see from the screenshot that the graphics bears a very strong resemblance to Sim City and is probably no accident.  For all of you were born after 1990 you probably don’t even know what Sim City is, so I suggest you download a demo and try it out right now (it is after all, one of the best games ever)!

The goal of My City is to build your own City and populate it by various means.  The game is presented in the same 3D landscape we know from Sim City, the difference is in how you build your city. In order to add buildings and such to your city, you need to add citizens; there are about 100 different types of citizens in all.  Each citizen has a purpose such as Factory Worker, Lawyer, Detective, Doctor etc. etc.  And when you add a citizen the game adds a corresponding building to your city.  For example, adding a doctor will add a hospital, adding a factory worker will add a factory.  You are limited in the amount of citizens that you can add per day and the amount of citizens you start the game with.    The application has very strong monetizing potential since you can purchase citizens outright via PayPal for $2 per citizen.  Alternatively you can perform various advertising related tasks like visiting sponsor websites to earn citizens without having to pay.  You can invite your friends to join your city so they can add their citizens to your city.  This aspect makes the application highly viral and effective and growing organically using invites.  I like the idea of the game, however, I think it would be more interesting if you were to start the game with more citizens, since you can only add 3 citizens every day, after you add them there’s not much else to do, even if you have more than 3 citizens in your inventory.  You can always marvel at your friend’s cities and the world’s biggest cities but other than that the application gets really boring really fast.  The game only really gets interesting is if you have a really large city where you have to manage it by requesting people to add needed citizens, but until you reach that kind of level (which unless you have a lot of friends)  will take quite a long time.   But if you are a fan of the original Sim City, you will probably enjoy playing this game.

According to AppData, My City has a monthly active user base of approximatly 600k players.

Each of us should do at least one thing to save the planet, like recycling or buying a Prius. When I found out I could do something for the planet just by playing Facebook Games, I was ecstatic. Not only I can do something good for the planet, I also don’t have to get off my ass. Therefore, I have filed this review under both Causes and Games categories because the Save the Planet application manages to combine the two. Coolapps created the Save the Planet application in order to incentivize donations to various charities. Save the Plant has a virtual currency called Lunch Money or L$. You earn Lunch Money by playing the various flash games offered. This money can then be donated to the various causes offers available such as feed the hungry, save the rainforest or donate water. For example; a grain of rice costs L$878, so if you donate say a L$1,000,000 worth of Lunch Money you actually donate 1152 grains of rice. Coolapps tallies up all the donations at the end of the month and writes a check to all the various charities. It’s a neat concept and is similar to the FreeRice program from the UN. As for the games (there are about 30 of them) are divided into various categories such Arcade, Card, Word and Strategy. The games are produced by third parties and are integrated into the application so that scores translate into earned L$. The quality of the games is pretty high since as I have mentioned they are developed by third parties and are probably licensed out to coolapps for use in this application. Of course you can also earn additional L$ by inviting your friends or challenging them in one of the available flash games.

The application has been gaining momentum on facebook as of late and has about 400k monthly active users. I expect its popularity to grow in the future; after all…it is for a good cause.