Webware

Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.

Flixster 1.0 sure didn't look this good on our BlackBerry Bold--but the next version will.

(Credit: Flixster)

We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.

The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry has all the essentials: a tab for box office hits, an area to enter your Zip code to find movies near you, a list of upcoming titles, and movies that have come out on DVD. You can even purchase movies via movietickets.com. Yet this movie "app" is not so much a native application as it is a shortcut to a BlackBerry-optimized version of Flixster's mobile Web site.

While a nicely formatted mobile site routinely delivers a better experience than navigating the site through a browser, winding up with a not-app after downloading an application feels like a cheap trick. To top it off, Flixster Mobile looks like a mobile site on BlackBerry and reloads every screen as you navigate. In contrast, the iPhone version, pulls show times and theater information into a stylized interface that in no way resembles the Flixster.com site, apart from the information it downloads.

Users aren't fooled by the bait-and-switch, either. Flixster's movie app on BlackBerry rates 2.5 stars out of 129 votes at the time of writing. The program's average iPhone rating scores higher, with a 3.5-star average for the current version out of about 16,000 user reviews.

Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that.

It looks like the brouhaha surrounding social-app moneymaker Offerpal Media is bigger than founder Anu Shukla's "sh*t, double sh*t, and bullsh*t" response to the accusation that its business is built on scamming consumers. It's got upcoming developments in two lawsuits, one in which it's the plaintiff and one in which Shukla is a defendant.

VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi reported Thursday that a lawsuit was filed in an Alameda County, Calif., superior court against Shukla and co-founder Michael Liu on behalf of Kevin Halpern, who alleges that he helped found the company and was then shut out. In a court complaint, Halpert says that in exchange for offering his social-networking expertise to what would become Offerpal, Shukla promised him a 15 to 20 percent stake in the company that never came to fruition.

The defendant's motion to dismiss the breach-of-contract suit is scheduled for November 24, according to public court documents. On Wednesday, Offerpal had announced that Shukla would be leaving her post as CEO and would be replaced by digital-ad veteran George Garrick.

But that's not the only legal dispute that Offerpal is in. There's a judicial settlement conference scheduled for Friday in the trademark infringement lawsuit that Offerpal filed against Kickflip, a former customer that went on to create a competing business, called Gambit, according to a person familiar with the court details. The suit was originally filed in April, and the status of a potential settlement is currently unclear because most of the events thus far, as well as Friday's scheduled meeting, have been behind closed doors.

But the reason why Offerpal has been in the news so much as of late has been because of Shukla's public altercation with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington at last month's Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco. In response to Arrington's allegations that Offerpal's profitable business, used by many social-gaming companies as a way for users to earn virtual goods in-game, actually misleads players into signing up for paid offers and subscriptions.

Following the Arrington-Shukla spat, a number of high-profile names in the gaming and social-networking world came out against developer-app scams and misleading ads. Offerpal maintains that it runs a legitimate business. But it's clear that this company's issues run quite a bit deeper than a single PR fiasco.

Offerpal Media, a company that helps social-network app creators make money from offers and surveys, on Tuesday announced that it had replaced its CEO in the wake of a high-profile onstage argument at a conference and subsequent press over whether it's scamming consumers who fill out offers in order to earn virtual goods in social games.

Anu Shukla, who founded the company and had been serving as CEO since its 2007 launch, will be replaced by George Garrick, who has served as the CEO of Flycast Communications, Wine.com, Jingle Networks, and Mochi Media. Shukla "will still be involved and help guide the company," an Offerpal representative told CNET News.

A statement from Shukla makes it sound like the company's been CEO-hunting for months ("I have known George for a long time...After many months of searching, I believe that George is the best CEO to scale the company to new heights. I am looking forward to working with him closely"). But the timing is a little too good to be coincidental: a firestorm erupted over Offerpal and other companies in its niche after TechCrunch's Michael Arrington confronted Shukla while she was on a panel at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco last month. Arrington accused Shukla of running a scam operation that tricks consumers into unwittingly spending money--and of course, he then blogged about it.

Shukla's response to Arrington was "sh*t, double sh*t, and bullsh*t."

But the industry has taken the controversy seriously. Social game makers like the massive Zynga have come out and said that they would ban potentially shady and misleading offers, even though those might make up a sizeable chunk of revenue, and on Tuesday social network MySpace joined the debate and said that it had modified its terms of service to outlaw "app scams."

Shukla was interviewed by VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi in a lengthy article published on Tuesday.

This post was expanded at 4:55 p.m. PT.

PayPal is preparing to launch a new payment system that simplifies the process of buying products from within an online application, The Wall Street Journal is reporting.

According to the report, the new service will be called PayPal X. It will allow users to sign in to their PayPal accounts and purchase products from within a respective application.

The service, which has reportedly been in limited testing, is eBay's best hope for capitalizing on the burgeoning in-app payment market, which has witnessed Facebook emerge as one of PayPal's strongest competitors.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook's in-app currency, Facebook Credits, is now being considered by many developers that are lured by the social network's size and reach.

Sebastien de Halleux, chief operating officer of social-gaming company Playfish, told the Journal that his company is trying out Facebook Credits to possibly replace PayPal. He told the Journal that Facebook's service "can create a lot of value by reducing friction and allowing many more people to spend money." It also helps that Facebook's system, unlike PayPal, is built into the social network.

With PayPal X, it seems the online-payment company is trying to stay relevant in a market that is becoming increasingly complex (and crowded). It should be interesting to see if PayPal X can help PayPal stay relevant--and compete with Facebook.

The hype surrounding Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 keeps heating up.

After Gamestop announced last week a $40 trade credit for those who preorder the game and bring it back to a Gamestop store by December 13, Amazon.com has launched a competition, dubbed "The Call of Duty-est Town in America." The contest is seeking the town or city with the most preorders of Modern Warfare 2.

According to Amazon, any town or city with a population of 5,000 or more can compete. It determined population size using the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

Whenever a person preorders Modern Warfare 2 from Amazon, the location is tallied. The goal for each location is to have the highest percentage of preorders. Realizing that population plays a role in those figures, the number of orders doesn't factor into the competition.

Amazon said on its contest page that it will give a $5,000 gift certificate to a charity that serves the winning town. If the competition had ended at the time of this writing, the winner would be Grand Forks, N.D.

The page also features some interesting information about those preorders. As of this writing, the Xbox 360 version of the game accounted for 61 percent of Amazon preorders. The PlayStation 3 and the PC versions captured 31 percent and 8 percent of the preorders, respectively.

"The Call of Duty-est Town in America" competition ends on the game's release day, November 10. The winning town will be announced that day.

After Sid Meier announced on Thursday that a new Civilization title called Civilization Network was on its way to Facebook, it had me thinking: what other games could I play until I'm ready to take on Meier's new title next year?

To determine that, I've spent some time with several games on Facebook and narrowed that list down to the titles that are actually worth playing. If you want to have some fun on Facebook, check out these games.

Get your game on

FarmVille At first glance, FarmVille might seem like a lame game that isn't worth playing. But once you give it a few minutes, I think you'll find that it's extremely addictive.

The premise behind FarmVille is simple: build a farm that grows all kinds of fruits and vegetables. When you first start the game, you'll see a few patches of land where you can start planting. From there, you need to ensure that your farm is healthy as you continue to grow the items in your inventory. The game features simple point-and-click controls, making it accessible for any Facebook user.

FarmVille's "neighbors" feature is quite fun. Users can find other "farmers" in their friends list and grow a nice, bountiful farm together. It's a great concept that adds more value to the game. And the best part is, the more people who farm in FarmVille, the more money that will go to Sweet Seeds for Haiti, a charity that gives healthy meals to families in Haiti. Try it out.

FarmVille features some fun, farming goodness.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Mafia Wars If you're as much of a fan of movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas" as I am, you might have some fun with Mafia Wars.

The object of Mafia Wars is simple: become a boss of a mafia family. When you first start playing the game, you'll see several different "jobs" that you can take on. They include (pretty much) any criminal activity you can think of. That said, you won't actually engage in those activities like you would in a Grand Theft Auto game. Instead, you'll simply tell the game that you want to perform a particular job and you will. When complete, you receive more cash and credibility. Think of it as a simple role-playing game.

Like the other games in this roundup, Mafia Wars has a social element to it. Your goal is to recruit members into your own family as you fight for mafia dominance. When that social element comes in, Mafia Wars shows its value. It's a really fun game when you play with friends.

Mafia Wars asks you to perform jobs to become a mafia kingpin.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Meez, a start-up that expanded last year from an avatar creation service into a full-out virtual world for teens, is touting some good news: it's been profitable since April and "every month is better than the last month," CEO John Cahill told CNET News.

Right now, Meez has about 13 million registered users, 3 million unique hits per month, and only 20 full-time employees plus about 10 contractors.

Where's the money coming from? Premium subscriptions, ads on the free version of the site, and virtual goods bought and sold with its internal "Coinz" currency--which includes a mobile virtual-gift deal with Verizon.

The company is making this announcement in conjunction with the debut of its MySpace application, which should be live on the News Corp.-owned social network shortly. It's Meez's first integration with a big social network.

"The MySpace app is designed to allow people from MySpace to use the Meez virtual world, and people using the virtual world on Meez.com will be able to integrate with the MySpace users," Cahill explained.

So why is the company's first social-network platform product built on MySpace, which has had well-documented drops in traffic? The demographic and culture are a better fit, Cahill said, pointing to MySpace's younger-skewing user base as well as a culture that encourages meeting new people online.

"We are working on a Facebook app as well, but every time we surveyed our audience, our audience was very much more MySpace-based than Facebook," Cahill said. "It's about discovery. It's about finding new friends. On Facebook, your friends actually tend to be your (real-life) friends."

Getting onto social platforms will mean that Meez is starting to compete for attention (and that other buzzword, "engagement") with social gaming behemoths like Zynga and Playfish. Brushing elbows with the companies that already have come to dominate entertainment on social networks is par for the course, Cahill insisted.

"We're all competing for Internet time," he said.

If you're expecting to get updates from celebrities on all their latest movies, you might be disappointed: Hollywood might be trying to curb celebrity use of social networks.

A Hollywood Reporter blog post recently reported that "there's a growing number of studio deals with new language aimed specifically at curbing usage of social-media outlets by actors, execs and other creatives." The studios hope confidential information about the films they're producing won't leak out on major social networks.

The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. blog reported that both Disney and DreamWorks have already added clauses to their talent contracts. A clause from Disney says that the actor should not make information available "via 'interactive media such as Facebook, Twitter, or any other interactive social network or personal blog.'"

Disney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

For its part, DreamWorks said Wednesday that no such clause exists in its talent contracts. "Everyone is allowed to use Twitter and other social networks," a company representative told me in a phone conversation.

It was originally believed that Cameron Diaz and Mike Myers were among the first celebrities to be affected by a reportedly new anti-social-media clause included in talent contracts from major studios.

According to DreamWorks, all of its contracts for anyone involved in a movie feature standard, "boilerplate" language saying the signer cannot mention their work on the movie until the studio has made an official announcement. After that, everyone working on the film (including celebrities), are free to talk about their films on any social-media platform.

In the end, it's not all that surprising that the film industry might be targeting social media. Earlier this year, the National Football League made its social-media policy public. That policy banned tweeting prior, during, and after a game for all players, coaches, referees, and media on-hand.

But whether targeting social networks is really the right move is up for debate. The Hollywood Reporter said that the new clauses might have been a reaction to leaks by celebrities tweeting information before it was supposed to come out. Paula Abdul, the publication said, announced her decision on Twitter to leave "American Idol," surprising Fox executives. Hollywood is trying to limit such leaks going forward.

It's understandable. And Hollywood has always limited what the talent can say about films. But is social media really the best target? Is it not a fine promotional tool? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Updated at 9:43 a.m. Wednesday PDT to include comments from DreamWorks.

If you're already possessed by the Halloween spirit, you'll shriek with delight to find that Facebook's cauldron includes a measure of worthy apps.

Check 'em out.

Halloween Apps

HalloweenBuilder is one of those apps that you're unsure of beforehand. But once you start using it, you quickly become a fan.

The basic premise of HalloweenBuilder is simple: create the jack-o-lantern of your dreams. The app offers numerous designs for the eyes, nose, mouth, and other features. From there, simply pick the designs you want and arrange them how you see fit. The app automatically does the cutting for you.

I really enjoyed HalloweenBuilder. I made a few designs, and each was quite fun.

HalloweenBuilder lets you create your own pumpkin design.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Halloween Pumpkins is another app that lets you carve a virtual pumpkin. The only difference between HalloweenBuilder and Halloween Pumpkins is that the latter requires you to carve your jack-o-lantern freehand. If you like your design, you can share it with other app users.

I enjoyed the app. Although its design wasn't overly impressive and the app did a great job of highlighting my lack of artistic ability, I had fun. And comparing my designs to those that were voted most popular by the users was interesting. Halloween Pumpkins is a great app to check out when you're bored.

My unique artistic ability.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)