Well, maybe. Depending on your definition of "smarter."

For example, does it make me smarter to know that New England Patriots fans on the Wisdom network like Narragansett Beer and New York Giants fans prefer Hennessy? Or that fans of both teams prefer Dunkin Donuts? And why is Wisdom still teasing its analysis of Super Bowl fans nearly a full-week after the game?

The U.S. Election breakdown is slightly more telling. Based on "likes" of candidates on Facebook in the last 12 months, it shows a handsome U.S. map showing which states favor which candidates, then shows the demographic makeup of each candidate's followers (in other words, the same information found in almost any decent political poll).

You can also drill down and look at your friends. You can see who has posted on Facebook the most in the past 30 days, the average number of words they used in each post and other trivia.I now know that in the past 30 days Maya Angelou and David Sedaris were the most popular authors among my friends, and U2 and Johnny Cash were the most popular musicians. Nine of my friends have made a combined 27 trips to Fenway Park, and one of my friends has been to the same hospital six times (whoever it is, I hope everything is okay).

I can also look at whom I interact with most. There are loads of other data, but not as much as you'd think: I can generally check every chart and figure on Wisdom within five or 10 minutes. And even as the network increases in size, not much changes on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis.

Among other things, Wisdom lets you check where your Facebook friends have been checking in to find places you may want to go to.

Wisdom gives you a chance to do some very limited number crunching of your own, but not much. The design is beautiful, and it seems somewhat addictive the first time you play around with it, but then you realize there's not much you can do with the data aside from look at it.

And that's the problem: Every time I finish scanning through Wisdom, I'm left with that "Now what?" feeling we get when we don't really know what else to do with an app. The data is interesting, but there's not much I can do with it: I can't download it, I can't even access it from my desktop, making it harder to crunch.

Wisdom has some recommendations on how to use the app, including finding places to go when traveling and finding out what's popular. I have loads of other apps that do all of the things Wisdom claims to be able to do, and, since they're focused (finding the best place to eat, keeping me up-to-date on news and trends), the information in those apps comes off as being far more manageable than the artfully-presented glut I get in Wisdom.

Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.

A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms.

Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we'd only have to launch one app to see all our photos.

Videos

For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version.

Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals to you, stay tuned, because we heard through the grapevine that Showyou has something to announce pretty soon.

Files

If you need to find files that could be anywhere, Greplin can help. It logs into your Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and more, and it lets you search all of them for the thing you need. Check out our guide to Greplin for more details.

It's available for the iPhone as well as on the Web at Greplin.com.

Places

If you're like most Americans, you might not get the point of location apps. The point should be to find cool stuff going on around you. But there are so many of these location apps, it's impossible to know which one to use. That's where Localscope comes in.

It's a browser for the real world. It lets you search or browse across pretty much every Web service that shares public location data, and the interface is easy. You just click side to side between Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing and more.

You can get Localscope for the iPhone or webOS.

Do you use any other apps for dealing with too many apps? Share them in the comments.

It gets worse: the more times you check your smartphone, the higher your stress levels. The study also suggested people who are used to getting lots of text messages and push notifications on their phones will feel stress levels rise if they hit a stretch where their phones are silent. In the worst cases, study subjects experienced "phantom" vibrations when, in fact, they had not received an alert.

Balding, the study's author, recommended that companies help employees address the problem.

"Smartphone use is increasing at a rapid rate and we are likely to see an associated increase in stress from social networking," he told the British Psychological Society's Division of Occupational Psychology Conference in Chester, England last week. "Organisations will not flourish if their employees are stressed, irrespective of the source of stress, so it is in their interest to encourage their employees to switch their phones off; cut the number of work emails sent out of hours, reduce people's temptation to check their devices."

While other researchers stressed more studies are needed, they agreed the advice that Balding and other experts give is reasonable.

"Now, certainly it's good to keep connected," Balding told USA Today. "But everyone needs a break. Some time on your own. Otherwise there's a risk that the stress and tension that builds up from keeping engaged can end up having a negative impact on relationships."

The Grooveshark HTML5 app can stream music from any modern mobile browser, including Safari on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Until now, the service wouldn't work on (non-jailbroken) iOS devices, since the desktop Web app for Grooveshark utilizes Flash for playback.

There's a Cross-Platform Compatible HTML5 Mobile Web App For That

Grooveshark isn't the first company to use the power of HTML5 to circumvent proprietary app store restrictions. The Financial Times launched a Web app of its own last year to get around Apple's steep subscription revenue share requirements. The browser-based version functioned as well as any basic native app and even led to an increase in mobile traffic for the Financial Times, thanks to its cross-platform compatibility.

Amazon has made HTML5 an increasingly central part of its mobile strategy as well, launching the Web-based Kindle Cloud Reader and more recently unveiling an iPad-optimized Kindle e-book store.

Grooveshark's reasons for having to go around Apple and Google are a bit different than Amazon's. The music startup isn't so much concerned about subscription revenue share terms, but rather has been ejected from native app stores because of the legally-questionable nature of its functionality and business model. The company is currently being sued by every major music label, with EMI recently piling on despite being the only one with which Grooveshark has a formal deal in place. The company allegedly hasn't been forthcoming with royalty payments to EMI, so the label has taken Grooveshark to court. Universal Music Group, Sony Music and Warner were already litigating against the company, accusing it of permitting widespread copyright infringement.

Grooveshark's longterm viability in the face of these lawsuits may be unclear, but for now the company is pushing forward and making its service available to more smartphone and tablet users.

As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.

All this closeness has apparently rubbed some the wrong way. It's attracting vibes of A-list exclusivity, a trope familiar from its version 1.0 days.

Rabble-rousing in rabble-free Path app, I'd link to my post there about app's elite community, but links aren't allowed.Should blog about it

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

The 150-friend limit (which used to be 50) reinforces this feeling. At the bottom of your friends list on Path, there's a gentle yet firm warning: "Share your Path with close friends." Since connections are scarce, Path has built into it a subtle tone of rejection.

You can't be friends with everyone on Path, and you might have to turn people down. You might get turned down. I really hope that doesn't hurt your feelings. If it does, I'm afraid the Internet has screwed up your mind.

Facebook people always say they're serious about the word "friend," but its interface constantly harasses you about adding more "friends," and makes it nearly impossible to say "no." When Facebook changed the button for rejecting a friend request to say "Not Now," I simultaneously laughed and barfed.

Path is not conducive to networking or discovering people. Twitter and Facebook are great for that. Google+ can dump thousands of new people on you without even asking. We don't need another place to network. What we need is a place for intimacy and trust that is still enhanced by the sharing power of the mobile Web. That's why my friends and I love Path.

@marshallk The only community on Path is the one each user makes for herself/himself.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

@marshallk Me, too. I use different apps for that.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 8, 2012

Marshall and I had the above conversation in public, on Twitter. That's what I love about Twitter. Sometimes people's conversations, even about little things, are useful, interesting or amusing to others. Twitter feels personal, but it's not intimate because other people are watching.

Facebook and Google+ allow "selective sharing," but it doesn't feel special. The interactions happen in the same old place with the same old crap-ridden interface, you've just chosen a different option from a drop-down menu. Facebook Groups are a bit better, but they're still not far removed from the cacophony of the Facebook feed. All these services want to be something for everybody, and they want to be everything for as many people as possible.

Path is not everything. For example, it's not the Web. People on the Web can see things you share on Path if you post them to Twitter or Facebook, but you can't use Path itself from anything other than the app on your phone. That's my why my dear friend Randall won't accept my request:

I'm sorry, I would (maybe), but I can't be your friend on @Path since @Path hates the web.

— Randall Leeds (@tilgovi) January 6, 2012

You also can't link to the Web from Path. URLs don't work. That's an intentional decision by the Path team, and a bold one. On all the everything-networks, linking to the Web is part of the experience. Google+ may suck at it, Facebook may kidnap your links and keep them inside its walls, and Twitter may butcher your URLs, but, in their weird ways, they let you bring in all the signal and noise of the Web. Path does not. That's one of Marshall's gripes:

@JonMwords well, don't try to share links there. Or copy & paste anything

— Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk) January 8, 2012

Let this be okay. Path is its own place. It is constrained on purpose. It's smartphone-only because that's the computer you have with you when you're out living life away from the Web. It only allows 150 friends because it wants you to think carefully about what you share and with whom you share it.

It lets you share thoughts, photos, videos, songs, places, the people with you, when you go to sleep and when you wake up. It lets you live real life with people, even if they're far away. My best friend from back in the day is on a work trip to Liberia right now. Path lets him share some of that with me. He could share it on Facebook, too. Yes. But it would be swept up in a sea of other noise. Instead, it happens alongside the lives of several other dear friends of mine.

This same friend also told me the other day that Path is making him a better person. It's keeping him "on the path," as it were. Because sharing to Path means that one's trusted, close friends will see something, it makes one carefully consider what matters to them. Thinking about sharing his life with us makes my friend plan each day more deliberately.

I don't credit Path with that. I credit our friendship. But when Path uses the word "friend," I don't barf. I may laugh, but it's no "LOL." It's actual joy.

In research done by mobile analytics company Flurry, users are spending 94 minutes a day with their mobile apps versus 72 minutes on the Web. Author Charles Newark-French attributes the drop to people using mobile apps to access Facebook more often than the Web. Can Facebook really have that type of affect on user behavior?

Flurry tracks anonymous sessions across 140,000 applications in its publishers network. That is roughly 14% of the entire app ecosystem. That gives us a large enough sample size to trust trends that Flurry reports.

Games are the top applications used by mobile consumers with 49% of time spent. Social networking is 30% with entertainment and news making up 7% and 6% respectively. This bodes well for companies like Facebook and social games maker Zynga. Neward-French notes that the session lengths of social and gaming apps are longer than that of other apps. People are using the apps more frequently for longer periods of time.

Expect the trend to continue. More people are connecting their lives to mobile devices and will expect that everything they can do on the Web will be on their smart devices. Think about your particular usage. When you are sitting on your couch at home or out and about on the town, are you pulling out your laptop and using a browser to check your Facebook or log into Pandora? Probably not when there is an easy alternative in your pocket that makes these functions accessible with the tap of the screen.

Have you noted your usage change since acquiring a smartphone or tablet? What is your go-to device for accessing information? Let us know in the comments.

Co-founder Cody Barbierri wrote in to let me know that, in the two weeks since launch (and it was over the holidays, too!), they added over 1,400 testers and 250 start-ups. The email was getting too long, so they've revamped the process. Only newly submitted apps will be in the email, and the rest are listed on the BetaBait site.

Only apps submitted in the past 24 hours are featured in the email, so recipients can view the latest submissions. At the bottom, there's a link to click through to the online directory, which offers tabbed browsing by category. It offers developers the same opportunity to pay to put their app at the top of the page. The Web view also includes Twitter and Facebook share buttons.

The developers we talked to at launch seemed pleased with the opportunity to get in front of willing beta testers for free. Now that this large directory of apps in testing is available online, it will be great to see how that impacts testing.

Check it out at BetaBait.com.

A generation ago I would have been forced to wait for halftime updates during the Jets-Giants games, but Twitter and a slew of apps designed specifically for sports fans allowed me to follow the game in real time (I also got to watch the Jets lose, which wasn't a half-bad consolation prize).

But these apps aren't just for when you can't watch the game -- they're great supplements when you're glued to the television or in the stadium and worth downloading before the NFL Playoffs kickoff on Saturday, as they help cut through a lot of the clutter and deliver the information most relevant in helping you understand (or vent) about what's happening on the field.

I've had some minor problems with this app crashing since I downloaded it to my iPhone 4 just before week 15, but otherwise, it has been my go-to app to see what other people are saying on Twitter as the game I'm watching (or not watching, as the case may be) progresses. The app offers game previews and real-time team and player stats, but where it really excels is in displaying relevant tweets.

SportCaster filters tweets by team, and it does an incredibly good job of filtering out the noise and keeping the content game-focused (as a Patriots fan, I've had more than enough of non-football related tweets from the likes of Chad Ochocinco). The app is made by OneLouder, perhaps best known as the maker of TweetCaster, a Twitter management client.

PlayUp

For fans who want to take their app additions one step further -- and don't mind signing up for yet another social network -- PlayUp offers an app that, at first glance is similar to SportCaster. The main difference, however, is PlayUp works more like a mobile social network for sports fans. Instead of culling tweets from Twitter, like SportCaster, PlayUp let's you discuss the game with friends and "friends" you've added.

I have not -- admittedly -- had a chance to use PlayUp's app while watching a game as of yet (and that's my fault, as PlayUp says it offers coverage for about 20,000 games each week, including the four major U.S. sports, Major League Soccer and Australian Rules Football). I plan to do so with Saturday's Stanley Cup Finals rematch between Boston and Vancouver, but I have to admit it takes a lot these days to convince me to join another social network. And if I wanted knuckleheaded, amateur, armchair quarterback-type comments, there are usually plenty of those in the living room or sports bar where I'm watching the game.

Mike Pereira

Not an app, but an actual person with close to 40,000 Twitter followers. Pereira is the former vice president of officiating for the NFL and the current rules analyst for FOX Sports. When - not if - there is a questionable call in this weekend's games, Pereira will most likely be the first to offer a clear-cut, unbiased explanation of the rule behind the call in 140 characters or less.

Today, PMN fulfilled a promise it made last year by doing something few would expect a newspaper company to do. Project Liberty, the company's tech startup incubator, is now open for business.

Digital Tools Fit For a News Publisher

CloudMine, one of the companies enrolled in the incubator, is a mobile backend-as-a-service provider for developers. It offers a pay-as-you-go API that hooks into their hosted server-side platform, freeing developers up from having to code custom backends. Why would a newspaper company have any interest in the success of such a tool? In PMN's case, a service like this could aid the company's ongoing efforts to bolster their mobile products and tablet strategy. Last year, the company made headlines by offering a $99 Android-based tablet with specialized news-reading apps for the Inquirer and Daily News. It was a bold move for a print media company, even if its earliest iteration was largely based around print-to-digital shovelware.

An even more obvious choice for a newspaper is SnipSnap, a smartphone app that lets consumers scan printed coupons to save and redeem later. SnipSnap CEO Ted Mann, a veteran of the newspaper industry, left his position as Digital Development Director at Gannett New Jersey last year to launch the startup. Today, Mann returns to the newspaper world, however temporarily, as he and his team set up shop in the Inquirer building. They will work alongside the newspapers' digital sales team, although SnipSnap is not officially a product of PMN.

Those on the editorial side will have the opportunity to collaborate with the folks working on ElectNext, a Web app that helps voters choose the best candidate in an upcoming election on the local, state and federal levels. The app works by asking users a series of questions about social and political issues and then matches them with the appropriate candidates.

Rebranding the "Newspaper"

Beyond the nature of the companies being incubated, there are few other obvious reasons for a newspaper company to make a move like this. For one, it serves as a marketing tactic to help rebrand a print publisher as a forward-thinking, tech-savvy multimedia company. By selling news-reading tablets and housing tech startups, PMN can paint itself as a media organization of the future rather than a soon-to-be relic.

Another formerly bankrupt news company, the Journal Register Company (now known as Digital First Media), is taking a similar approach this year by launching a tech incubator of its own, which will be geared toward startups specializing in advertising, editorial content and audience development. Like PMN, this move helps Digital First Media find innovative potential future partners and fits in with a larger strategy of rebranding itself for the twenty-first century.

PMN's experiment may be the first of its kind at a big city daily newspaper, but its not the first time that any publisher has tried incubating startups. Hearst and Conde Nast have both launched digital products built by in-house startups, some of which have nothing to do with the publishers' traditional businesses.

A few years ago, moves like this would have been seen as particularly revolutionary and forward-thinking. Today, they're still smart, but are more about survival than thinking ahead. As print revenues continue to decline, traditional news publishers desperately need to find new ways to both build their audiences and monetize their efforts in a way that can make up for the cash they keep hemorrhaging on the print side. The Web has made the former significantly easier than the latter.

Incubating tech startups may not lead to an explosion in revenue overnight, but it's a smart step in the right direction. As PMN CEO Greg Osberg said during a presentation at Temple University last year, "I want us to find the next Foursquare and house it at Philly.com." In time, revenue growth is more likely to come out of innovative efforts like these than from clinging to print and milking hideous Web banner ads for every last nickel.

Newspapers and Startups: A Two-Way Incubation

The intimate relationship PMN is establishing with local startups serves not only to fuel the growth of those new companies, but it may also help adapt the culture within the host organization itself. A lot of "future of news" types like to talk about how old media companies should adopt a startup culture if they want to survive. As anybody who's ever worked at a legacy media organization knows, that's far easier said than done.

Having had no other choice, PMN has already started the process by making moves like this, merging its newsrooms and demoting a top editor that they saw as not being digital-savvy enough. What better way to encourage a startup culture than by bringing startups down the hall from the newsroom?

The holiday season typically sees a surge in mobile application downloads, especially once Christmas Day arrives and countless consumers all over the world unwrap their new Android devices, iPhones, iPads and iPods. In a true testament to the continued proliferation of these devices, this year's holiday spike in app downloads was a one for the record books, according to Flurry's data.

Apple hasn't released numbers, but there's little doubt that items like iPads, iPhones and the iPod Touch did quite well this holiday season, and for those who already own such devices an iTunes Store gift card made for a no-brainer of a present. Amazon's own Kindle Fire, which has access to a limited version of the Android Marketplace, was that company's top-selling and most frequently gifted item this holiday season as well.

The 1 billion weekly downloads threshold may be a new one, but it's one that Flurry expects to see continue well into 2012. There's very little reason to doubt that prediction, as smartphones and tablets continue to pick up steam in the marketplace and new devices from Apple, Amazon and Android handset manufacturers are expected to drop throughout the year, in many cases at lower price points.

Mobile analytics company Flurry has been tracking the progression of iOS and Android application penetration across the world. No surprise, the United States is the most mature smartphone market on the planet. The rest of the world is catching up. China and South Korea both have made great leaps in 2011 to bring smart devices to users and where there is a smartphone, there is an app for that.

The U.S. has the highest install base of Android and iOS devices running apps in the world at 109 million. China is second at 35 million with the United Kingdom third at 17 million. The mobile app market is by no means saturated. Flurry still sees lots of room for it to grow.

Flurry encourages app developers to look overseas for potential growth markets. For instance, in China there are 122 million middle class adults age 15-64 that are not using iOS or Android. In the U.S. that number is 91 million (figuring a 200 million potential smartphone user base or about 60% of the population).

This brings us to the "addressable market." Right now, the most mature markets are the ones that have the highest penetration per, population. That means that the U.S., Sweden, Hong Kong and Sweden are the most mature. At the same time, the U.S. still has lots of potential to grow in iOS and Android adoption. Take a look at the chart below.

This chart is a little confusing if you do not know exactly what you are looking at. Here is the explanation from Flurry:

• The vertical axis measures our total addressable audience (TAM), which we define as adults, 15 - 64, who are at least middle-class. The TAM per country is represented by the larger, light blue circles. The U.S., with the largest light blue circle, has the largest TAM at 200 million. The horizontal axis shows percent penetration, which is the active user (iOS or Android device that used an app over the last 30 days) divided by the TAM

Now that we have a look at the mature markets, which ones have the most potential? The light blue portions of the circles show the potential for the apps ecosystem to grow. In this chart, the U.S., Japan, China and India have the highest potential. Sweden and Hong Kong drop right off the map.

Expect developers to start focusing on more emerging markets in 2012. The U.S. may be the test bed for popular apps, but there is big money to be made overseas. Is your studio planning on taking advantage? Let us know in the comments.

That is the macrocosm view. What about the microcosm? How much data are we producing per minute? We found an old infographic from mobile advertising company Mobclix that shows just just how much data we are creating each minute when using our mobile devices. Check it out below.

In that minute, 4,111 ads were clicked in Mobclix's network. That translates to 400,710 ad requests. The click-through rate of mobile ads does not appear to be very healthy. Those clicks amount to $2,340 dollars spent by advertisers in the U.S. per minute.

App downloads have been growing exponentially in the last few months. In October the App Store saw 23,148 downloads per minute.

Check out the infographic below.

On the iPad, Skitch lets you pull up photos, screenshots and Web pages and annotate them with arrows, shapes, text and lines. It's a stripped-down offering compared what Skitch can do on the desktop, but for the tablet form factor, it works quite well.

The app even has a built in Web browser so you can snap screenshots and scribble on them as needed. Of course, you can always take a screenshot of any site or app on the iPad by simultaneously hitting the home and power buttons on the device. Those images land in your "Photos" collection, which Skitch can then pull from.

In addition to marking up images and maps, you can pull up a blank screen and use Skitch like one of the many digital whiteboard applications we've seen. In fact, this application could easily replace most of those offerings while providing a whole slew of handy new features on top of it.

All marked-up images are saved automatically within the app. They can be emailed, saved locally or tweeted out to the world. You can plug in your Evernote account to save things there, but it's by no means a requirement.

The first iOS app for Skitch comes a few months after the service was acquired by Evernote and subsequently launched an Android app.

ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.

A Browser For the World Around You

Localscope is currently available for iPhone and webOS only. This is actually the launch of version 2.0; the app has been around for almost a year. Version 1 helped users find things nearby using publicly available geo data. It was a nice interface, but not a unique offering. Version 2.0 is much more than that. It's a browser for the world around you.

The app has three views: gallery, map and augmented reality. None of these interfaces is new to the market, although Localscope's UI design is striking.

But here's the difference: while a photo discovery app like Trover or a business finding app like Yelp can show you its own content through these same kinds of views, that's all it has. Localscope lets you toggle between whichever location-enabled service you want to find something nearby.

Localscope has both a search mode and a discover mode. When you choose a mode, it goes straight into the view you last used, and a scrolling list of services appears across the bottom. They include Panoramio, Google's map-based photo network, Instagram, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Google and Bing, as well as the open-source service Wikimapia. Siloed services like Yelp are conspicuously absent.

Find What You're Looking For

The app will grab full location info, usually from Google, when you choose a place. But you don't have to search for a restaurant; you can just go find neat spots people have photographed on Instagram or tweeted about. That's the kind of exploration that drew me to Trover, but Trover is its own network, while Localscope searches across a bunch of different, more popular ones.

The best touch is the compass, though. You don't have to hold your phone up in the goofy augmented reality position. The app uses the phone's compass, and it displays the direction of the object you're looking for everywhere, even in the list view, using a floating compass icon. You can start walking right away. It never takes more than two or three taps to find something that interests you and start looking for it.

This is what I've been waiting for, a location app that isn't about gathering data from me, but about showing it to me. And having access to so many services means that the exact thing I'm looking for is bound to be in here somewhere, never more than a few slides and taps - and then a short walk - away.

Localscope is available in the iTunes Store for $1.99.

It's a free, email-driven service. When you join, you're on the daily email list, which breaks down the apps by category. BetaBait charges $50 for a sponsor slot at the top of the email, so readers see sponsor apps first. That's it. If you've got an app, there's no reason not to use it.

BetaBait just wants to be helpful and make a little dough from sponsors. The website has places to sign up, info for sponsors and a short but helpful primer on marketing an app to early users.

Does it work? It's only been out two days - and BetaBait itself is still in beta - but apps are already seeing results. I emailed all the founders on today's list to ask, and I got a bunch of responses right away.

Quoc Nguyen, founder of local hotspot finder RedSpark, says, "We were extremely surprised in the influx of interest in our product the day after we published on BetaBait."

"I was able to track that 3 people signed up from it," says Sean Barkulis, co-founder and CEO of personalized "smart-calendar" UPlanMe, which has only been on the list one day. "Not bad, considering we were 3/4 of the way down on the e-mail."

Check the Mail makes a full-featured email client for iOS devices that, once its out of beta, will be able to work with all the major free email services. Its team says it's seen traffic and sign-ups both days. "What we really like about BetaBait is that the sign-up process was simple and quick and emphasizes getting the point of our project across in a very succinct manner," the team says.

I got one really thorough response from Erik Lagerway, founder of stealth social iPad app Hookflash. He says "they really need to improve upon" the BetaBait dashboard, offering analytics and stats to testers. Right now, it's just a panel to manage the email listing, as seen here:

That does sound nice, but maybe it's a lot to ask for a totally free service. Lagerway is also frustrated by the inability to track signups specific to BetaBait using its own tools, but UPlanMe handled this by putting a special tag in the link it submitted.

It's a simple, free service, and I'm sure the team will appreciate Lagerway's feedback. If you want to put your app in front of people who want to test apps, BetaBait is a no-brainer.