If your Facebook, e-mail, Twitter and text alerts aren't intrusive enough, meet an app called Pops, which makes them more so. But there is a twist.
A free app for Android phones, Pops lets you choose an animation that can be assigned to specific kinds of alerts, or to alerts from specific people. Instead of your phone just showing an icon when you receive a Facebook alert, an animation can take over your screen.
But here's the twist, it also lets you send messages with animated alerts that show up on the phones of recipients.
There are list of conditions, though. Pops only works between Android devices, and both have to have the Pops app installed. The people you want to send Pops to have to be in your contacts list. Yaron Orenstein, co-founder of Pops, said the company would soon change that so you can send a Pops to a number not in your contacts.
In a test of Pops, the animations provided worked the way they were supposed to. I tried one with monsters disgorging other monsters for Facebook alerts and a space ship animation for incoming texts.
The app only activates the animations when your phone screen is idle, so it won't interrupt other things when you get text. You can also set it to run only between certain hours, so you don't have a laughing skull appearing on your phone at work.
Pops current settings allow animated notifications for SMS messages, Gmail, Facebook, Google+ and gTalk.
Mr. Orenstein said Pops would respond to more sources of notifications in the future, like Foursquare, and that they would be adding animations from commercial partners, like record companies and movie studios. “Hopefully, we will be able to replicate the popularity of ringtones.â€
