Wakoopa is a community website that provides information on what programs and applications its members are using.
It installs a little memory-resident program that relays information on what programs are being used, the time periods and frequency of use.
Users can then use the site to learn about popular software and/or leave their opinions in the form of mini-reviews or comments.
Wakoopa is intended to provide a great way to (a) peek inside people’s machines to see what software they are actually using, (b) learn about new programs that members may be using in order to test these myself, and (c) I thought it would be an excellent way find software mini-reviews and access the opinions and feedback of fellow users.
Here are some notes on this service:
- Signing up: you don’t need to sign up to browse Wakoopa, but when you do you get your own profile page and can download the local client that will include your program usage in the database.
- New versions: Wakoopa can tell you that there are newer versions of programs that you are using (similar service to Filehippo update checker).
- Contacts: you can add your friends and/or other people to your profile in order to easily access their pages.
- Mini Reviews: Wakoopa invites all users to author little mini reviews; these typically are just one and two liners though unfortunately.
- Tags and categories: you can hone in on the kind of programs you’re interested in using tag and category clouds that are everywhere on the site. Not sure if the tagging is done automatically by comparing with some database or by editorial activity or both.
- Security: if you don’t like your program usage behavior monitored or have doubts that the local client might relay more information than is declared then don’t sign up. You can still browse Wakoopa without registering, but remember the site will not have any content if everyone withholds sharing their information.
So how useful is this? In my experience I’ve found it to be interesting but not too interesting. It would be great if the makers of this implement features such as recommendations “we think you would like this based o people with similar usage profiles”, or “if you use this/these programs, you might like the following programs”. Also, it would be great if it told you what the license is for programs (freeware, shareware, commerical) and supplied links to the program pages.
The biggest concern for a service like, which only gets more useful and interesting as more and more people join and more data is collected, is that people don’t find it interesting enough to keep the local client alive and taking resources on their machine (even if it is a small 8 meg app). For a software fanatic like myself I know I will keep coming back and watching how this service changes and grows.
Go to the Wakoopa page.
