Social Connect Facebook App  [starrater tpl=10]

So many people (millions) are turning to social media sites and social dating apps on these sites to find dates, connect with people who have similar interests, and to have fun by sending digital greetings to friends and potential dating partners. Social Connect is the most creative, dynamic and fun social dating and lifestyle app on Facebook. It just launched on April 21, 2010, but it has been growing at a rapid pace. Besides letting users find dating partners and connect with like-minded singles and friends, Social Connect also offers a special section called FaveScapes for users to checkin to local hot spots, provide reviews and find the best places listed by City Search and the Social Connectors. An added bonus is the innovative Guardian platform to facilitate safer and more secure dating, along with the alibi functionality to let users shorten a dating encounter.

User Interface
Social Connect is extremely user friendly, with a fun, expressive and vibrant design. The bubble motif conveys energy and passion, and the rich color scheme has a pastel palette for the buttons and tabs, and there are tool tips, with colorful bubbles, to help convey particular info to the users. Also there’s a really cool demo video on the home page of the app, which, in addition, to providing a brief tour of the Social Connect app, is entertaining, with a romantic cute storyline.

User Interaction
This lifestyle app engages users with ratings, creative digital greetings, including charms that are virtual gifts to send for fun, celebrations, special occasions, and range from teddy bears, to roses, chocolates, champagne, birthstones, diamonds, and sports cars. Social Connect also integrates with FourSquare, Twitter and CitySearch for users to check out and check into local hotspots and to search users by faves. Users who get the most charms each week become “Princess/Prince Charming”, so the app also has a game quality, with a treasure chest to keep precious charms, a secret box to answer and respond to secret questions, and a patent-pending feature called The Guardian to provide peace of mind for users meeting someone for the first time. It’s kind of like a virtual chaperone.

Utility and Productivity
Making friends and finding dating and romance partners on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Hi5 is very common. Social Connect makes this even easier with a wide array of targeted search options (local, faves, ratings), and Social Connect through its Favescape feature really provides great info about local hot spots, including restaurants, bars, clubs, spas, attractions, movie theaters, and hotels. The Favescapes also provide a common ground for members to meet and if users have the same or similar Favescapes, they already share something in common.

Final Score
Social Connect is quite possibly the most original, imaginative and comprehensive dating app launched so far. Great attention went into the design, the user interface, and even the creative charms. Very intuitive and lots of fun for all the Social Connectors; and my prediction is that “Social Connect” may even become a phrase to signify to connect for fun, romance, and amp up your social life and scene. This app gets a 10 out of 10.

http://apps.facebook.com/social_connect/index.php

My Campus Facebook Apps

One thing that people absolutely should love about Facebook is how it allows people to share with each other. The amount of sharing, even by the standards of the internet, that goes on through Facebook channels is unprecedented. Because of that, apps like Check My Campus are becoming all the more popular.

User Interface

If you are familiar with how photographs and blocks of text look on Facebook, you’ll know everything you need to know for dealing with the user interface that Check My Campus brings forward.

User Interaction

As is often the case with applications that try and blend in with the overall look and feel of Facebook, the interaction and the interface are tied together. The interface is basic and so too is the interaction. With the interface requiring you to know how to read text and look at photographs, the interaction requires you to know how to scroll between the two as well as know how to post them yourself. If you know how to do these things with other Facebook applications, you have quite handily conquered the realm of knowledge that comes with Check My Campus.

Utility and Productivity

The main idea behind Check My Campus is that university students can show high school students what life at university is all about. If you take a look at what Check My Campus has to offer, what you’ll end up realizing is that Check My Campus is basically a place where university students can share their wisdom with high school students. You can post pictures of your campus, share stories about it or disagree with the stories that other people from your campus have posted. There is a large amount of give and take when it comes to this application and that is why the sky is truly the limit when it comes to what you can accomplish with it.

Final Score

Under most circumstances, an application as specialized as this one would lose points because of its lack of broader appeal. However, it is important that we don’t lose sight of the fact that Facebook originated as a means for students sharing information. That is why it is possible to give this app a high score even due to its highly specialized nature. That is exactly what we have done because Check My Campus has received a score of 8.5 out of 10.

The marketplace is more of a formal arrangement of something that already takes place quite a bit on Facebook. That being said, it is a free application that is verified officially by Facebook. This official sanctioning essentially means that this Facebook app is easy to use, effective and free. You can count on all of those things and more when you use the Marketplace.

User Interface

The interface for Marketplace is very similar to any other point and click application that you use on Facebook. There are going to be many screens that you have to read through, but all of those screens exist within the overall Facebook interface. That means that reading through everything should be relatively easy for you to do.

User Interaction

Interacting with Marketplace follows the same general level of ease that the interface has. When you interact with this application, you do so through pointing and clicking with your mouse. If you want to get in touch with someone else that is active on the marketplace there might also be some typing involved. However, since browsing is the majority of what takes place on the Marketplace, pointing and clicking with the mouse is really the full extent of what you are going to have to deal with.

Utility and Productivity

The basic premise of the Marketplace app is to take all of the people that use Facebook and give them a chance to exchange merchandise with each other. As a member of the Marketplace, you have the ability to buy, sell and trade. You also have the ability to give and ask for items in the absence of money. Finally, the Marketplace also gives you the chance to sell items and have the proceeds go directly to charity.

In the end, the main categories are items for sale, housing, vehicles and jobs. These are the main things that people purchase in life and for that reason Marketplace has the ability to help you get exactly what you want in terms of tangible items. That is what makes this such a valuable application to the average Facebook user.

Final Score

Marketplace is an impressive application and it will continue to get more impressive as more people begin to interact with it. Any Facebook app that gets better as it is used by more people is an app that will get a higher score from us as a result. In the end, we awarded this app a score of 8.5 out of 10.