Trivia with Facebook Friends for iPhone: Fun with personal privacy

Trivia with Facebook Friends, not to be confused with Zynga's Words with Friends or other 'with Friends' games, has arrived in the AppStore today. The new trivia game for iOS is designed to test just how well you know your friends (or 'friends') on the world's most popular social network. While this isn't the most original idea, the Los Angeles-based creator Mention Mobile does a fine job of harnessing all of those personal, yet still very public, tidbits from your pals and turning it into an amusing way to pass the time.

Start the game, connect it to your Facebook account and then answer a series of questions about your Facebook brethren, which include birthdays, hometowns, dating and marital info and details on recent Facebook activity. Most of the questions I encountered during a quick five-minute play-through included a combination of these factoids. These are mixed in with additional timed puzzles where you have to identify people's profile pics or order a list of friends from youngest to oldest.

Every players starts Trivia with Facebook Friends with five lives, which are lost when a question is answered incorrectly. Once your lives are gone, it's game over. Much like a classic video game, you can earn extra lives by answering bonus questions or just wait a few hours for them to replenish. Trivia overachievers have to option to buy additional lives for a small transaction, or if you don't want to deal with this limitation, you can pay $10 for eternal lives (as well as the ad-free version of the game). It's also worth pointing out that there is a free, ad-supported version of this game, or an ad-free version for $0.99.

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There is one strange side effect to playing Trivia with Facebook friends. While the game is well crafted and entertaining, it's still shocking to see just how much personal information that people (including myself) put out there without realizing how many others can see it. Considering probably a handful of the 900 people I am Facebook friends with are actually people I consider close friends -- most others are colleagues or business contacts -- it proved to be an eye-opening experience. Guess I'll have to come to terms with the ever-changing definition of personal privacy or, do the unlikely, opt out of the big social media experiment that Facebook, Twitter and the like that has quickly become an integral part of many people's every day lives.

Download Trivia with Facebook friends in the App Store >