Last.fm lets you share your music life, MySpace lets you share your social life, Flickr lets you share your pictorial life, and now Wakoopa lets you share your…well, software life. Amsterdam-based Wakoopa, which launched today, is a social network for sharing software and game use. Built by two twenty-somethings, it allows you to have a ’software profile,’ making your daily desktop life public.
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How It Works
Wakoopa’s signup process is one of the easiest I’ve ever seen (at least on a social network!). Users provide a username, password, and get a page with the download links for the Wakoopa tracking software. Choosing from either PC or Mac (um, aren’t Linux users software-lovers as well? After all they do make it themselves 
), users install the software which puts a system tray icon in their taskbar. The software, literally, is nothing but an icon which asks you to put your Wakoopa username and password upon being clicked on. Of course, in the backend, your daily software usage patterns are passed on to Wakoopa which keeps track of your software profile.
Once you’ve got the software setup, and this process is faster than reading the last paragraph, you’re pretty much set. If you check out your profile at Wakoopa, you’ll see a list of the current programs running and user reviews of them. Also, there’s a very useful list of “New versions of my software,” which would probably be the one thing I’d definitely use Wakoopa for. There is also a “Software I might like” section, which provides recommendations based on your current software usage.
Opinion
As a social network, I think Wakoopa is one of the best executed ones I’ve seen in a while. Everything from the signup process to seeing your software recommendations takes like than 5 minutes, and its interface is also very easy to use. As an idea, while I don’t think this kind of a thing will ever reach the mainstream, I am certain this is going to become a must-signup for geeks.
