Rating:
It’s seldom that I have an opportunity to write about an application as completely and utterly useless as the Facebook Name Analyzer. So devoid of worth is this thing, that I briefly considered not writing about it, but then I considered, why would someone make a terrible app if they weren’t searching for some derision, so I’d like to express a particularly confused WTF?! in regards to the Name Analyzer.

Let’s start with the impact page. Name Analyzer greets users with this:

So using this as the apps thesis statement, we can deduce that in addition to being yummy, original and unique, there is some meaning hidden in our names. It seems that, according to Analyzer, “The letters of your name spell out the truth about you.”

OK. Let’s bite. What do the letters in my name spell out about me?

Ouch. Alright. One out of five — I’ll let you guess which one. It scored a 20 percent accuracy on my first name.

But it’s an analysis, right? It’s not going to be 100 percent, but there has to be some formula behind the words it attributes to me, right? It does, after all, spell out the truth about me, revealing the hidden meaning in my name — right? Wrong.

It just applied random words that start with the letters of your name. Yea, it’s like those airbrushed shirts that cheerleaders wore in high school. You remember:

Name Analyzer is so detached from any real analysis that there is actually a settings page where you can change the words attribute to the letters of your name, which, if the ridiculous attributions didn’t already refute the app, this should thwart it entirely.

So essentially, this app does nothing but scrape words together from a dictionary and stick them on the letter of your name. Amusingly, the only word it seems to have for Y is “yummy,” so there are a whole lot of curiously yummy people. I’m not even really sure what that mean, but there it is, name analysis.

That said, this is pretty much what I think of the Name Analysis app:

In closing, I’d like to say a few words regarding this review and a few additional comments regarding the state of the apps (my next address on that topic is coming soon). First of all, I’m giving this app a .5 rating at the bequest of Rodney. While I believe it is a completely worthless use of bandwidth, Rodney made the valid point that at least it doesn’t crash, so, with that in mind, it deserves above a 0, because there was some coding prowess that was executed effectively. Congrats on that.

Moving on, I still feel that these apps are indicative of a much larger failing to utilize platform effectively. There are over 187,000 people on this app, so clearly I’m the one that’s missing something, but judging from what I see here, it’s something that I don’t mind lacking. People should demand more, developer can do better, you should all try harder. Yea.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook platform, stupid facebook apps, name analyzer

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