Larry recently had a friend blog about Wakoopa, and his friend basically ridiculed it and called it dumb and useless. Obviously, this meant that I _had_ to go try it out. What’s my verdict? Yes, it is dumb and useless, but then again, so is Twitter, and Digg, and Last.fm, and Flickr, and practically every major Web 2.0 service out there. What matters is that it’s fun.

Essentially, Wakoopa is a social website for tracking what applications you use and how often you use them. Once you register on the site, you’re asked to download a small program called Wakoopa Tracker (Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and Mac OS X). This app sits in your taskbar (Windows) or menubar (Mac OS X) and tracks which applications you’re using. Every so often, it sends that data on to the main Wakoopa servers. Frankly, you don’t even remember that it’s there.

Eventually, people can find you on Wakoopa and see how often you use various apps. It defines “use” by it actually being in the foreground and you interacting with it–it doesn’t count it as being used if it’s running in the background. This is actually a good thing, as there are many applications that run without you knowing about them. Dock and SystemUIServer are apps that are always running, albeit always in the background. Now the stats here may be really predictable (most of us will have most of our time logged in our respective web browser), but it’s intended to be fun, not necessarily useful.

Of course, Wakoopa is a social website, which means that you can of course find your friends on there and see their app-usage stats. Wakoopa even has something called “Teams”, which essentially allows you to form groups with things in common that people can join. Wakoopa will then aggregate the usage stats for everyone in the team to find out how many hours are being used up on their common apps. (I say we find out which web browser is used the most…)

Wakoopa also allows you to not just find out info about users, but each application gets its own page as well. On an application’s page, Wakoopa will list the latest version of the app, a description, and a link to the app’s website. It will then aggregate how many hours it has been used by all members of Wakoopa, and how many Wakoopa members are using it. And, my favorite idea, it allows Wakoopa users to rate and post their own reviews of these applications, so you can really get a collective idea of whether that app you want to try out is good or not.

All in all, Wakoopa is a fun Web 2.0 service that is great at tracking what apps you use, seeing what apps other users use, and being able to collectively review them and share them as a community. For me, I consider it as yet another way for me to share information about myself that no one in their right mind would care about. Some people might say that it sounds like the stupidest thing ever, but that’s also what most people said about Twitter before they tried it for 3 days and got hooked (hey, I was in that boat too!). Wakoopa is quick and easy to set up, and then you can just let it do it’s thing without any effort on your part. I definitely recommend this service to anyone who just wants to share more useless info about themselves on the revolution that we call the internet.

Final Rating (out of 5):