MyHeritage Celebrity Look-alikes is another one of those rating applications, this along the lines of selecting one of your photos and then matching it to a celebrity in their database. After you have selected the celebrity, other users get to vote on a scale of one to ten how close you resemble that celebrity.
It’s a basic application: just another form of Hot or Not, substituting a look alike to how hot you are. The only real option is to keep viewing people. The application also has a few nifty features, like morphing your photo into a celeb and then posting it to your profile.
Their. database is pretty large — it seems to contain over 1,000 images to select from — and the face recognization technology they have built into Flash is pretty good, and the usability of the application is also very well done because it has all the little details that many of the MySpace applications are missing, like hover over effects and indication of state. A nice feature would be selecting from a list of a friends and doing a separated by birth joke.
If they actually built advertising into this, there could be some advertising opportunities, and this application does link to a paid service, creating your online family tree so there has been some thought put into this.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.
Not all applications are about usefulness: Pokey is this great little animation of your own little pet on your home page. The dog fetches frisbies, digs up bones, needs to eat. There’s a definate fun factor here, and the animation is one of the best I have seen for a while.
Don’t pay enough attention, the dog barks. Go away for a long time, the dog sleeps. Feed the dog, and a bag of dog food appears (I hope they are charging Science Diet for showing the bag and logo). It’s cute, but I don’t think it has a ton of lasting power.
It’s easy and fun to use, but there are no viral functions to the application — it just seems people just add the application through the application gallery, and you would think they could use the dog to send messages.
There are no monetization applications for this now. We’ll see where it goes.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.
Truth Box — this is a “me too” application, because it’s easy to build, and there’s quite a few other applications just like it.
The whole concept is that people can comment on your profile anonymously, and you can review the comments without making the public right away. It’s an application that appeals mostly to the teen set, I guess, because you can tell someone of what you think of them without having to reveal who you are.
While this particular application isn’t particularly attractive, it’s fairly easy to use, and most of the functionality is easy to find. The viral functionality works the best (of course), and one of the interesting issues with it is somehow people were able to submit comments about a profile I had before I had the application, so I could view them from the storage area.
The is purely a page views application, so the targeting for advertising is almost nil.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
I’m going to start reviewing the applications of MySpace I come across that I think have some value. Most of them have a serious fun factor — did you really think any of them were going to be actually useful — but there are a few of them that truly extend the profile.
The first is Own Your Friends. This is a fun application, it now has close to 900,000 installs. Staggering.
Own Your Friends is an application where you can buy your friends, almost as trading cards. It works almost as a market model where every time a friend is bought, the price goes up. Of course you also get rewarded for visiting the site every day, sending bulletins, inviting other friends, and giving your friends to others as gifts (the real secret of the application to making money).
However, if you are really into watching your friends’ number go up on MySpace, this is the application for you, because you’ll come back just to see how much you are worth a few times a day (I know I’m doing it on a couple of accounts just to try it out).
Like most of the new applications, the usability has a lot to be left desired — it’s not designed to really take advantage of a limited space, and on the canvas, to fully see everything I had to turn my monitor vertical, and even then, I had a scroll bar. I would offer to help redesign this application just to make it better because there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this one.
From a monetization standpoint, this application is all about page views, because there is really no targeting that can be done, so the application developer is going to have to figure that out. Also, the stability of the application lends itself to the suggestion that this is a homegrown application by someone that has never seen the traffic MySpace can generate.
There are some ideas that could come out of it.
Application rating (1 to 5, 5 being highest):
I know this has been around for a while, but I still think it’s relevant — Mike Davidson does a great job of showing how to design an effective MySpace page. He also gives you a sample page to start from so you can customized based off of that.
Designing applications for the Facebook and MySpace APIs have been all the rage (and the newest way to spam). Most of them aren’t very good because the designers don’t understand the nature of designing a limited user interface application, and frankly, the execution of most of the ideas has been poor or non-existent.
I’ve worked directly with the MySpace API team and am currently designing the user experience of several MySpace Applications (probably more of them on the current list than anyone else).
Here are some guidelines for designing MySpace applications.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
