Appolicious: An Innovative iPhone App Directory
by Bill French on 11/05/10 at 5:00 am
Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
I don’t often get excited about portals and forums, but I definitely get excited when a site delivers unique utility value in a specific market segment. Appolicious has done exactly that. They’ve hit on a very important challenge in the mobile apps market; how do you help people decide which apps are good (or best) choices given a specific individual’s context?
With a few hundred thousand App Store choices, how does a newcomer, or anyone for that matter, decide what apps are best or will provide the best overall iPad or iPhone experience? Picking apps is a roll of the dice and to some consumers, the choices (even the featured choices) are like sipping tea from a broken water main.
Indeed, consumers have no ability to determine if the apps they want are categorized as utilities, or productivity apps. And they don’t have time to ponder this mostly useless, and 1800’s style of information categorization.
Appolicious lists can be about any topic, for any purpose, and curated by any user. Appolicious members can quickly establish a list about a very specific topic such as The Best Apps for CMOs. A list may contain no more than ten apps and each pick has a brief field to describe why this app is in the list. The list system also provides a way to publish external links to sites and articles that helped you decide what apps made it into your list.
I created three lists recently – mine focus on apps that C-level execs and managers will find useful for iPad only. As you’ll see in the lists, many of the apps selected were influenced by articles at iPhoneCTO.
- Apps for C-Level Executives and Managers
- CTO: Top 7 Apps for a Chief Technology Officer
- iPad Note-Taking Apps for Managers and Executives
This alternative, a place where the experiences of app users are published and their findings act as mini lighthouses, provide just the right guidance in developing wish lists that users can aspire to.
In the spirit of Web 2.0, the user-generated-generation is keen to leverage this model because it socializes app knowledge and provides a greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts value proposition. The Appolicious approach will be a huge success because their founders recognized that they don’t know, and never will know how best to categorize apps; only users know better and other users are far more likely to trust peers concerning app performance and value decisions.
Making It Better
There are some features that would make it better.
- App prices can be looked up automatically through iTunes; why not add little display queues to show how expensive (or cheap) a list is?
- Display the number of views for each list in every display context. As it is, the UI doesn’t allow me to look at stats for my own lists; only “likes” and comments are displayed.
- Make it possible to create lists of lists; imagine three separate lists would be ideal for a commercial photographer. Rather than rebuild the individual apps of three lists into one, allow an abstract approach for bundling apps.
- RSS feed of lists and list search results. This will allow lists to sprout legs and get shared across many social networks.
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