Palm Pre App Review: LikeMe (fail)

LikeMe Came Out Recently for the Palm Pre.

Finally, one of the first Palm Pre Apps that didn’t come out with the phone is ready to review: LikeMe. I unfortunately give it a fail (on a scale from epic fail to epic pass).

Logging In

Wondering what LikeMe’s site is?  It’s LikeMe.net.  If you’re Like Me, you probably did a google search for them and couldn’t find them right away, even after typing in “likeme app.”

Anyway, I first found the app using the app catalog on my phone.  When opening for the first time I had to take around 3 minutes to fill in all my details.  Good thing I like the palm pre keyboard.  I think it’s strange however that you can go straight to their website to sign in, but it also gives you the option of joining through facebook, which would have made life just a bit easier had they let me do that on my phone to start out with.  Why wouldn’t they let you sync with facebook through your Palm Pre?  Seems like everything else on the Pre does…

So naturally when I went to login online with my computer it asks me for my email address as the login (as opposed to the username I set up as well).  I could only remember the username I created for myself (I usually go by nupollution) but I couldn’t remember the email address I had stuck in while signing up earlier on my phone, but I saw the facebook login option and went with that to simplify things (I was already logged into facebook, so I didn’t have to enter any login info).  After I logged in that way, it still gave me the option to login the old fashioned way, and wouldn’t you guess, it was the same email address I use to login to facebook with.  It’s not smart enough to know only one person can have that particular email address and log me in via facebook automatically (with my permission of course)?

Non-comprehensive Listings

Let me tell you about Provo Utah.  There are a few extremes here, and one of them is how extremely boring it is.  The only thing people here in Utah Valley can do to have fun is go out and commit the sin of gluttony.  You would think that there would be a good amount of restaurant selections as soon as the phone tracks your position, but you’d be wrong.  When I launch the app I see a poultry 8 or 9 locations to eat, 2 of which I’d recommend, 6 of which were accross town and inconvenient recommendations.  I assumed right away that this was due to the infancy of they app, so I hopped on my computer and checked out their site (where it was difficult to login).  This time, there were more restaurants and other types of locations like swimming pools and resorts in town and nearby, but still a very small amount; 25 or so out of hundreds.  Strangely, on the left of the website there is a menu where you can navigate through several screens to find your state and town, only to see a huge list of all restaurants in Provo Utah.  So you have too many choices on the left, and not enough on the right, and almost no choices where it counts most; on your phone.

The LikeMe App for Palm Pre only has around 8-9 restaurants/locations for Provo Utah (out of hundreds).

Now I know, I know, I’m missing the point of the app and the website.  It’s supposed to be a social network where people of my same market segment (they let you put in information about your self including income level, spending habits, etc.) choose favorite businesses, restaurants and bars, and they capture all of that data and cross-recommend the same places to people in my segment, yada yada yada.  If that’s it, then give me an easier way to look up and input my favorite restaurants, other than force me to use a computer, login clumsily, fumble through a huge navigation list (even though they could tell where I live through my facebook account, so I’m still waiting to see the point of doing that unless I’m one of those people that wants to show what restaurants I chose with some obscure app), and find restaurants out of a list of hundreds in alphabetical order.  And the search function doesn’t find anything for me either.