Have You Seen This Cool New App?

Posted on 05. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Mobile Stores

“hey, have you seen this cool new app?”

Apps discovery is one of the hottest area right now. If you can become the gateway for all apps, you will dominate the world of mobile consumer behavior and be able to create a layer of monetization through trafficking and data.

Take Apple: it just doesn’t seem that interested in adding social filters for now. The iPhone App Store has Top 10 lists for various categories of apps, but it doesn’t let customers see which apps their friends, family and coworkers like or don’t.

I’ve talked about the promising first steps of AppsFire, a bootstrapped startup whose iPhone app acts like a meta-app reading your library of downloaded apps and recommending new ones based on various filters.

Two new entrants in the scene made the news this week: Appolicious and Uquery.

Appolicious. http://www.appolicious.com/, founded by serial entrepreneur Warms http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090901/serial-entrepreneur-al-warms-debuts-appolicious-hoping-iphone-apps-fans-will-find-it-delicious/–who banked his Participate Media, along with its BuzzTracker content aggregator, by selling them to Yahoo in 2007.

Warms is also an angel investor in Stocktwits, Trada, AdGooRoo, Directory of Schools, DOS Partners, and Moving Station as well as Wallstrip, which was bought by CBS.

As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your apps. Also like other social bookmarking services, you can “follow” other people whose apps you like. The”my network” feature will highlight people like you who save and share items that fit your interests.

Apps discovery is one of a hot area right now. Always more startups are jumping into the space with the hope to make money out of it. And there are plenty of reasons to agree with them: if you can become the gateway for the discovery of mobile apps, you can bank on the data (mobile user behavior) and advertising that come with it. Think of Google + DoubleClick. Brands are moving fast into the space and so are their budgets.

I’ve already talked about the promising first steps of AppsFire, a bootstrapped startup, whose iPhone app acts like a meta-app, reading your library of downloaded apps and recommending new ones based on various filters.

Two new entrants made the news this week: Appolicious and Uquery.

SOCIAL DISCOVERY WITH A BIT OF AFFINITY

Appolicious is the latest effort of well-known serial entrepreneur Warms (who sold BuzzTracker to Yahoo in 2007).

How does Appolicious work? As with Delicious, you have an account where you save your apps and can “follow” other people whose apps you like. Once you sign-up, you can use the App Library Builder to import the list of apps from your ITunes or you can manually type in their names. As a member, you can also rate and review your apps.

Next step: create your social network. Here you have only two options for now: importing your Gmail/Yahoo contacts or adding users with similar tastes. No need to say that this part needs the be expanded by means of Facebook Connect and other social graphs tie-ins, as Twitter or FriendFeed.

Finally you’re ready for some recommendations which are served by Appolicious itself, by your personal friends or by the people like you whom you are now following.

It’s too soon to seriously evaluate Appolocious; but Warm is definetely up to something and he knows it. He is working with developers to extract new metrics not available from the App Stores and plans to be there, when brands will want a trusted partner for their apps.

A few thoughts:

-Why isn’t Appolicious an app?

-Widgets. From your apps “personal” stream to the live feed of your network to the Appolicious’s App pages which aggregate content from various sources and are usually very rich of information. Being able to package those info into widgets and embed them in your other social networks/blogs would be a further incentive to use the service.

-Lifestyle Profiles & Engagement. I like the idea of profiling users this way, but why not letting them set-up alerts when new apps reach a certain threshold of downloads? Say I am a TechJunkie App User, I’d like to be able to follow the Tech Junkie Recommender and be alerted if something new is worth a download. Also why not letting users who are very engaged (reviews/downloads/ratings) become like the gurus of those channels? Show-off seems to be quite an integral part of the app experience.

-Developer and Brands Pages. Anything here in the pipeline?

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DISCOVERY VIA SEARCH

Uquery wants to be the search engine for apps. It is pretty fast and offers various filters which allow for better queries: by category, price, publication date. It also features a Twitter button to allow users to tweet about an app. But don’t be misled: uquery is not a social search as much as a shopping engine.

Unfortunately though, unlike Appolicious, the app pages have very little information besides the descriptions pulled from iTunes. And no review or rating is incorporated to help the user make an informed decision on whether or not to download an app.

Open questions:

-Is an app in the roadmap? or…to say it straightforwardly, would it have any chance to be approved??

-How does the ranking work? Or in the Google lingo, what is the equivalent of PageRank here?

-How does the advertising work? Is it going to be based on keywords or will it be more of a category display ad? Not much is disclosed on the uquery site for now.

Overall uquery feels a little underwhelming for now, but again it might be too soon to tell.

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