Music lovers all love Last.FM [App Store<\/a>]. It keeps all your friends and even strangers up to date with the music you listen to, and it also recommends new songs for you. It’s the perfect social networking tool revolved around music. Well, what about applications? Wakoopa<\/a> adds similar functionality for your favourite computer programs. <\/p>\n If you’re a software geek, you’re gonna love this. With a tracking client for Mac, Windows, and Linux, this is a cross-platform app, but it’s still relative to Mac OS X.<\/p>\n I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I’m very impressed. Not only does it track your application usage by time, but it also records what applications are running in the background, and for how long. And if you don’t want somebody seeing that embarrassing game or web app, just hide it. If you go to the applications you’ve used, you can just hover over it and click “Show this to nobody,” and it will stay your own little secret. <\/p>\n If you go to the public listing for an application, there’s tons of helpful information. For a lot of apps, it will show you similar applications, which is nice if you’re looking for an alternative. It also shows users that have used the application, including those who are most active with it. Not to mention lots of user reviews and scores (Features\/Interface\/Performance\/Value for the Price – out of five) that can help push you in the right direction if you’re still trying to make a decision.<\/p>\n If you take a look at the application’s page, there are also some pretty pointless, but still interesting, statistics. For instance, if it’s a cross-platform application, it will compare Windows, Linux, and Mac users by percentage. There’s also a graph on the page that shows, in Alexa style, the application’s popularity (in users) over the last thirty days. Again, pretty pointless, unless you’re doing some sort of research, but still fun to check out.<\/p>\n If you’re browsing through apps, there are categories. There are things like design, games, security, internet etc. If you’re bored and looking for something to do, browsing through these can kill quite some time. In the software tab, there’s also a “What’s going on right now” feed that updates every time a member uses an application. It’s pretty neat, and it can help you find people with interests similar to your own.<\/p>\n Onto your own personal profile page. This page is more powerful than it looks. It shows you a marquee of recently used applications up at the top, which is neat for people checking out your profile and under that, it shows your top 10 applications, as well as a pie graph showing what you used the most in three different time intervals (yesterday, last week, and last month). It also shows a tag box on the right side of the page which shows bunch of categories for the applications that you’ve used (most used being larger text).<\/p>\n Now, if you head back to the front page, you’ll see that they’ve got some software recommendations for you, under the “Random Software” heading. I’m still looking for a way to view more recommended software, but as it is, this is pretty helpful. I’m only seeing six applications, and two of them are “Tweetie for Mac,” which I’m already using. Seems to be a bit faulty and such, but it’s still a nice feature. There are also some featured users on the left, so you can check out what they’ve been up to and maybe find some new software.<\/p>\n Last but not least, there’s a nice leveling system to keep you hooked, if all the above isn’t incentive enough. You get points for various things, such as using over 100 hours of software, or writing software reviews. There are a bunch of others, but I’m not going to just copy and paste the whole list – check it out yourself. I’m not sure if the levels really do anything. As far as I can tell, they’re just for bragging rights, but it’s still fun to try and increase your score and see what level you can get up to.<\/p>\n