How Popular Are You analyzes your # of friends, tagged photos and wall comments to determine your "popularity score" and tell you how you compare to the rest of Facebook when it comes to popularity. For example, I have a total score upwards of 3k and I'm considered to be more popular than 88% of Facebook users. You can also view your friends' popularity scores and post the results to your Facebook wall.

My Photo Stats analyzes your photo albums and your tagged photos to show you combined stats on your photos and your #1 paparazzi (the person who has taken the most photos of you). As you can guess, my #1 paparazzi is my wife. Creepy! Anyway, you can view these stats for your friends as well and you can post the results to your wall.

The idea behind these apps is that the data they reveal is interesting to the user and their friends, and each story encourages other users to visit the apps and find out their own data. At least, that's how I hope they will function. I think it's likely that "How Popular Are You" will be the more successful of the two since it really plays on social affirmation, while "My Photo Stats" just looks at photo information. As far as I'm concerned, I just need 1 application to be successful right now so I can build some serious traffic and get the rest of my games in front of an audience.

Tomorrow I'll start working on yet another application, and I hope that in the meantime you will check out the two that I have mentioned and share them with your friends!

Chain Rxn on Apptism

App Store Link

I think it's worth mentioning that I built TweepSync because I needed a tool that would allow me to manage my Twitter friends & followers in this way, and I couldn't find a single good tool already available. The closest options I could find were Twitter Karma, which never worked, and TweeMaid, which charges $15.95 for a service I knew I could build in a day. Furthermore, neither of these services offer the feature I just launched (follow those who are following you). This means that TweepSync is the only tool that truly allows you to sync your Twitter friends and followers in just a few simple steps. I know that sounds like a wild claim to make, but it's the truth and you can believe me when I say that I now use TweepSync multiple times a week to help me keep my friends and followers in check. It's one of my primary tools in my "Twitter toolbox" that I use to improve my presence on Twitter.

So I hope you'll try TweepSync if you haven't already. If you like it, please share it with your friends so that I can build more tools for Twitter power users. If you have any feedback or questions, post them in the comments and I'll respond ASAP. Every little bit helps!

I launched my second Flash game, Ruby Rocket, which I posted a preview of a while back. It's a very fun, simple, and addicting logic puzzle game that you can play in just a few minutes (but you might spend hours trying to beat it). You can play it on Facebook, or if you really do not wish to log in, on Kongregate.

I launched my first true Twitter application, built with the new OAuth Twitter API. It's called Tweep Tycoon, it's a very complete game, and you don't have to give me your password to play it. In Tweep Tycoon, you can buy other Twitter users as your pets, and climb the leaderboards by building the largest "social portfolio." The goal is to buy desirable pets that others will want to buy from you, so that the prices go up and you make more money. It's fun when you get into buying wars with others! You can play it at TweepTycoon.com.

I launched a Twitter tool that grew out of a personal need to remove a huge chunk of users that I was following, but who were not following me. I fell for a Twitter scam recently and ended up with hundreds of followers that I DID NOT WANT, and I needed a way to view those users and bulk-un-follow them easily. I tried a few tools online; one never worked, and another demanded $15 for what is essentially a handful of API calls. So, I set out to build my own.

Using the foundation I developed for Tweep Tycoon, in just a day of coding, I had "TweepSync," a tool that analyzes your friends & followers, extracts those people who are not following you, and shows them to you in sets of 20. You can un-follow (or bulk un-follow) these people and because it works in manageable chunks, the whole process happens very smoothly. I can't promise that it will work so well for people who are following thousands of users, but if you are in my boat, you'll be fine. You can find TweepSync at sync.tweepsync.com, and if you find it useful, all I ask is that you share it with your friends and maybe on your Twitter profile. I have some more tools in the works, like a reverse tool that lets you follow the people who are following you and a tool that lets you find new people to follow, so I'm hoping this will be the first milestone in a "suite" of useful Twitter tools for the masses.

So now that the products are out of the way, I'd like to talk about my new attitude toward Twitter. For years I insisted that I had no interest in Twitter and happily ignored it altogether. I spent most of my time on Facebook anyway, and I didn't think I was missing out on anything. Now thing are different. I while back I signed up for a Twitter account for my company, Mappdev (@mappdev), so that I could have an extra platform for announcing new products as I launched them. Recently, however, I realized that in order to build my marketing for my business (and incidentally, myself), I would need to get more involved in the Twitter conversation and put the same amount of time into it as I used to do with Facebook (especially since I'm doing Twitter apps now). So, I created another account for myself (@montoya_c) and started actively using both accounts each day. Though I still don't like Twitter itself, I've come to the realization that it's a great marketing tool and a good way to build a presence online. Coincidentally, I'm probably most interested in it since I am working with the API… that was the case with Facebook, after all. All that being said, I've also realized that I will perpetually be the person who is swimming after the ship weeks after it has set sail.

So, I'm serious about Twitter now and I'd like to ask you to follow me on Twitter if you use Twitter too. My accounts are:

• @mappdev — follow this if you are interested in hearing about my new games and related industry news.
• @montoya_c — follow this if you would like to talk with me and see the news & links that I share.

I can promise that I'll follow you back because I think Twitter should work that way already. My goal is to build a large following that I can use to market my work, but if that doesn't happen, I'll at least have a list of friends that I can talk with. That's what Twitter is all about, right?

So, in short: play my games, use my tools, and be my friend on Twitter. Thanks!

In other news, Tweep Tycoon has some cool new features, and I think it's worth mentioning that I built the whole thing in less than 2 weeks. Awesome right?

By the end of that Saturday I had a lot of code put together, and I was actually able to complete some basic actions, but I was moving too slow. The following Monday I decided to remedy this situation by rebuilding the whole thing in Kohana PHP, which was another learning experience, since I had worked with Kohana in the past but had never built an entire project from scratch in an MVC framework.

Fast forward 2 weeks and I'm ready to share my work with the world: Tweep Tycoon!

Tweep Tycoon is a buy-and-sell-your-friends Twitter game in the vein of Facebook classics like Friends For Sale and OWNED. I've structured it to be very simple and intuitive:

• You can buy anyone on Twitter as your pet.
• Each time someone is bought, their value increases, and they receive some money.
• Each time someone is bought, their previous owner receives some money too.
• Each day you log in, you'll get a fixed amount of bonus money.
• As people are bought and sold, their value increases.

This is really all there is to it. My plans are to add more features, like gifts and social actions, but the game is currently fully integrated with Twitter and all the basics work, so I think it's definitely ready for people to sign in and play (and kick the tires too, I hope). Give it a try and let me know what you think… I'm hoping to get serious with Twitter games and this is my first step in that direction.