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?

—–

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.

Remember when people used to compare their phones by the tech specs? Pixels for the camera, MP3 player, etc? Luckily that’s not the case anymore: today no one cares of the hardware (sure the hard-core geeks will always do…), what makes the difference is the software: the services and the content. Alas in 2009 lingo: the APPS.

The numbers are impressive: 65,000 apps on the App Store in less than a year. Still something is wrong with the user experience: the discovery process. Once you download an app, it sits there and you might as well forget why you downloaded it. The App Store experience is autistic and often times apps are used for as much as one time…

So welcome to Appsfire, a über-app with one mission: helping you share your apps and discover new ones. To be clear, you do not really share the apps themselves, but the names of the ones you select. Your friends will see your list and have one-click access to download them, from the App Store.

In order for the app to work, you have to install it on your machine first, so that it can scan and index your iTunes backup file. And then you’re ready for sharing. The reason of this extra-step is explained by AppsFire on their blog: Basically Apple does not let you read what’s on your iPhone. Each app has its own sandbox and except maybe the contact book, no app can communicate with another app making the listing of your own apps impossible from the iPhone.

Peace&Love to Apple and its limitations…

So here’s how the app works.

1) Download AppsFire on your machine

2- (optional) Select the apps you want to share and choose your favorite network: Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, widget, link. (In my case Facebook didn’t work …but the app is still in beta so a few kinks are still being ironed out. Other technical limitations as the indexing are well known also - not all the apps, even some famous ones, are yet recognized by the AppsFire engine). [Update: please make sure you download the latest Appsfire version, which should be able to view all your apps].

3) Download the App on your iPhone or iPod Touch. The app will let you share your apps via email in a rather smooth way. Or you can discover new ones. The options are Top Downloaded Apps, Top Apps in Your Area and Apps from a few Internet celebs: Loic Le Meur, Corvida, Louis Gray, etc.

Overall kudos to AppsFire for their job.  A few thoughts:

-Reviews: being able to review the app a friend recommends,before being kicked out of Appsfire into the AppStore, should be a priority.

-Sharing- It would be nice to have Facebook Connect  in order to make the sharing a smoother user experience.

-Multiple Bundles & Alerts- Why not allowing various bundles for each user so that the sharing could be more targeted? like My Idiot Apps, My Useless/Useful Apps, My MustHaves etc. Additionaly, I’d like to see an option to send a simple alert to my friends if I add an app to one of the bundles that has already being shared.

-Friends Feedback – Why not letting your friends acknowledge that they liked the apps you shared with some sort of feedback mechanism (Apps Downloaded by XX friends or App Liked/Hated by XX friends).

We’re just in the infancy of the app store “revolution”. So it’s nice to see some innovation popping up. Once AppsFire will be ready for prime time, there will be infinite ways to make it a money maker. From the usual suspect (affiliate links) to analytics, the most valuable one: what are people most shared apps by geo-location or demo (via Facebook), what are the most frequent bundles, super- sharing options for business accounts (e.g upload of email lists, etc).

For now, go get yourself some (Apps)fire!