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Posts Tagged ‘Discovery Service’

Report: iPhone, Android, Blackberry users use the same apps

Filed under: Software, Freeware, Developer, iPhone, App Store

I’m not sure if this is a fascinating peek at the way we’re wired or an obvious conclusion based on reason, but I’ll let you decide. Despite the fact that they seem to be polar opposites on Internet forums and comment sections, Android, Blackberry, and iPhone users all end up using mostly the same apps. That’s according to an “app discovery service” over on Facebook called Mplayit, which tracked 42,000 visitors and the apps they preferred for a set of “genres.” Turns out that for the various categories, the same cross-platform apps tended to be the most popular on the different platforms. Evernote topped the charts for Lists and Notes, Shazam and Pandora were on all three lists for music, and apps like Yelp and Facebook sat high on the chart for multiple platforms. In the end, an app is an app is an app, “app”arently, and it doesn’t really matter which platform you’re using it on.

There were a few difference of course — in the “Utilities” section, things were different for each platform. Bump is the most popular for iPhone, Google Goggles was most popular on Android, and Vlingo won on Blackberry. As far as I know, with the possible exception of Bump, those are all platform-exclusive apps. But in general, if an app is available on multiple platforms, a popular app on one platform means it’ll be popular on the other. Good to know both for developers (a hit in one place means a hit somewhere else, too) and for consumers: next time you choose a smartphone, the apps probably won’t matter as much as the hardware features.

TUAWReport: iPhone, Android, Blackberry users use the same apps originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As Technorati Falters, PostRank Launches New Blog Ranking Tools

Social media analytics firm PostRank has released two Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will alow developers to track reader engagement in any group of blogs or around any single link with just 15 seconds of latency. Technorati’s announcement last week that it is scaling back and changing its blog ranking activities, and putting new emphasis on in its blog advertising network, prompted PostRank to launch their APIs now.

The same API used for ranking by the AdAge 150 and the Atlantic Monthly’s new political blogger leaderboard is thus now generally available. Determining the most-closely watched bloggers on niche topics is something a lot of people want to do for a wide variety of reasons – when that determination can be made programatically you can jump into the center of a conversation quickly.

Sponsor

PostRank looks at any RSS feed it’s given and scores all the items in those feeds for number of comments left, inbound links, times bookmarked in Delicious, being shared on Twitter and several related metrics. The company says it has agreements with many services to have data pushed to them and queries the Delicious endpoint themselves every 1 second, for example.

Some good sample lists are Postrank CTO Ilya cloud computing blogs or the general list of top design blogs. The new APIs will make it easy to build lists around any topic or group and display that data on other sites.

Blogsearch data has been a consistent problem for PostRank, both Technorati and Google Blogsearch data has been inconsistent for the company. PostRank says it will be launching its own trackback discovery service shortly.

While some meme-tracking services struggle with niches where blogs don’t heavily link to eachother, PostRank says that by tracking multiple forms of user interaction it has captured data that closely resembles what can be found from services tracking absolute web traffic to individual sites.

Last month PostRank released a new analytics tool that displays social media engagement on top of Google Analytics data. The new APIs will allow 1000 requests a day for free for noncommecial use, commercial licesnses are available as well.

Disclosure: PostRank is also sponsor of the forthcoming ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit. It’s also one of our favorite services on the web.

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Appolicious is Like Delicious for iPhone Apps

Looking for new iPhone apps? With a marketplace filled with over 65,000 applications (give or take), finding the best ones via iTunes has become an exercise in futility. With the next big Apple announcement a little over a week away, we still have high hopes that Apple will introduce a version of their iTunes software that makes it easier to find new apps which appeal to you. In the meantime however, we turn to the various startups addressing this issue in their own unique ways. The latest company among them to debut an app discovery service is Appolicious, a new social network and app sharing site which reminds us of the social bookmarking mainstay Delicious.

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To date, we’ve seen a plethora of app discovery services appear including app tracking sites like Apptism, app discovery tools like AppBeacon (our coverage), Digg clones like Freshapps (our coverage), app recommendation services like 16apps, and even “apps for sharing apps” like Appsfire (our coverage). Despite the number of offerings available, there are those out there who are convinced that the problem has not yet been solved. One of those folks is Al Warms, an entrepreneur known best for selling BuzzTracker to Yahoo in 2007. He has created a new service called Appolicious which aims to make app sharing and discovery a breeze.

About Appolicious

According to Kara Swisher of All Things Digital, Appolicious is “a combination of Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo, with some Yelp sprinkled in…” but we think the new recommendation service is, as the name implies, closer to that of social bookmarking tool Delicious. As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your items – except here, instead of links, you’re saving apps. Also like Delicious, you have the opportunity to “follow” other people whose items you enjoy. Similar to Delicious’s “my network” feature, this will highlight people like you who save and share items that fit your interests. Again, we’re talking apps not links.

The basic concept behind this idea is to mirror the real world of friend recommendations. You know, when your iPhone-carrying buddy says “hey, have you seen this cool new app?”

How it Works

Of course, in order for you to share your apps with others, you first have to import them into Appolicious. If you want to be more selective, you can manually type in the names of the apps you own, but the easiest way to get started is to do an app import.

The App Library Builder is a Java-based tool which scans your iTunes library for your owned applications. Getting to the tool is a bit harder than it should be we think, since it’s not prominently featured on the main Appolicious homepage. However, from your “edit profile” page, clicking though on the link “view my full app library” from the blue box at the bottom of the page will get you going.

Once started, the app detects the location of your iTunes App folder then presents a list of all your apps. Checkboxes are provided so you can check and uncheck the apps you want to import. Unlike our experience with Appsfire, Appolicious accurately detected our applications…all of them (save for jailbreak apps). The apps are then added to your library.

Once imported, you have the opportunity to rate them or write a review, although these steps aren’t really all that necessary. By simply owning an application and sharing it on the service, that in and of itself is a recommendation of sorts.

Finding Friends Needs Work

To get the best recommendations, you’ll need to import some friends to Appolicious. Unfortunately, the service only allows you to import friends from Gmail or Yahoo! mail by logging into your account using your username and password. Despite featuring a Facebook Connect option for login to the site, there doesn’t appear to be a Facebook friend import. Neither is there a way to import friends from other social services like Twitter, for example.

At the very least, you would think that when you land on a user’s profile page there would be an option to add them as a friend, but even that isn’t an option. Sadly, without better friend finding/following options, the entire service’s concept could easily fail. We hope they’ll address this issue in a future update.

Recommendations

For now, we can overlook the poor implementation of friending features because Appolicious itself serves up its own recommendations. Plus, by categorizing your “app personality” in your profile (I’m a “social networker” and “tech junkie”), you’re offered recommendations from people like you – that is, those who have categorized themselves in the same way.

Conclusion: We’ll Give it a Shot

Overall, though, we like the concept of social network such as this. With a much better import process than Appsfire, it’s already off to a good start. And the Delicious model is a great one to mimic for a recommendation service. As long as Appolicious can address the friending issues mentioned above, it could really be a contender for the best place to discover new apps from your friends. That is, unless Apple surprises us with an App Store update that perfects app sharing and recommendation in iTunes itself.

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Bodega: App Store of Mac OS X

Filed under: Software, Reviews

With the success of mobile application stores (led by the iPhone’s App Store and then copied by virtually every other mobile platform), it makes sense that the next step would be to try to extend that all-in-one browse/download/buy experience on the desktop. The Linux distribution Ubuntu is working on trying to release an App Store-like AppCenter repository for its next desktop release and many Mac users have suggested or opined that an app store for Mac OS X would be beneficial.

Earlier this week, IDFusion Software released Bodega, an independent attempt to bring an App Store-like experience to desktop Mac users. The free program, offers up a list of applications — both free and paid — that users can download, review and buy. If you purchase an app, you deal directly with the developer, but your receipt information is stored within Bodega for easy reference.

You can search for applications (more on that later) and get information on the app, read user reviews and see if there are any press reviews (the press clippings apparently come from Bodega’s built-in source list so they aren’t complete or exhaustive).

I played with Bodega for a bit and tested to see how it works as both a store and an app discovery service.

Continue reading Bodega: App Store of Mac OS X

TUAWBodega: App Store of Mac OS X originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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