ReadWriteWeb

More app developers are going to go "Android first" over Apple's iOS this year, according to a survey by research firm Ovum. While there is a legitimate chance of this happening, we will believe it when we see it. It often seems like analysts are shooting in the dark with these types of proclamations, no matter what kind of survey data they collect.

All the corollary evidence suggests that developer interest will overtake that of iOS. More Android devices are shipped and activated across the world every day than iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone. The Android Market is growing rapidly. Analyst firms love this type of parallel data. But will reality catch up with theory?

Trapit, a personalized tool for discovering Web articles, opens to the public today. Trapit crawls roughly 100,000 sites, adding more sources every week, to provide users with the most relevant content from deep within the Web, not just the popular or SEO-spammy results. It's built on the same AI technology as Apple's Siri, which means it learns what interests you and gives you better suggestions over time.

You enter a search term for whatever you want, which you can save as a "trap" that will automatically refresh with new content as it's published around the Web. Every time you log in, you'll see new stuff to read, and the suggestions get more personal every day. The Web app launches today at trap.it, but Trapit was developed as a platform, so this is only the first stage. "We expect to power sites and services across the Web," CEO and co-founder Gary Griffiths says.

Thoora, your robot buddy for exploring and sharing topics on the Web, is coming to Android tablets, and maybe even to your new Kindle Fire. Thoora's new app, optimized for Android 3.0, is available in the Android Market now for free. The team plans to submit to the Amazon Appstore after testing on a Kindle Fire, and an iPad version and smartphone apps are coming before the end of the year.

The Thoora app has nearly all of the features of the Web version. Users can create and explore topics that Thoora builds for them using machine learning and deep Web search. Articles discovered on the Thoora app can be easily shared on all the major social services. Whether it's just for fun or for serious research, Thoora digs deep to find you relevant content, and it feels great in the tablet form factor.

With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.

At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.

App recommendation service W3i has just launched a new platform which targets mobile, to complement its existing PC and Web application recommendation services. The obtusely named W3i "Ad-Funded Payment Platform," aims to help developers achieve both their discovery and monetization goals, the company says. To do so, it will reward users with virtual currency within free mobile applications for installing apps from W3i's advertisers (i.e., other developers).

At present, the platform focuses on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad apps only.

Fans of "old media" who treasure the sensation of flipping through inky newsprint have argued against the customized curation of Internet news. As they see it, this eliminates the chance of discovering a story or topic you didn't know you were looking for. However, the Internet has been known to leverage technology in order to resolve these conflicts. Just as Pandora helps music lovers discover music according to their tastes, a new app for the iPhone - The Accidental News Explorer (ANE) - invites users to "look for something, find something else."

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.

Bloggers, muckrakers and news fanatics, lend me your ears. It's entirely possible that we've discovered one of the best approaches to media monitoring since RSS itself. My mother always said, "You'll never get what you want unless you ask." But with adaptive feed application Parse.ly, that simply isn't true. Rather than forcing us to abandon our overflowing feed readers, Parse.ly records our preferences and learns to work with us.

Shazam, the music discovery iPhone application which gained widespread adoption thanks to its appearance in an iPhone TV commercial, is now getting a ton of new features thanks to the launch of a premium application called Shazam Encore. This new application adds music recommendations, trend charts, music searches and more to its core set of features already made available in the free version of Shazam.

Does this mean Shazam is about to give Pandora and the like a run for their money?

In an ironic twist of fate for 2009, Fox's IGN Entertainment, a company known for its game reviews of products like Zombie Apocalypse acquired What They Play. The newest member of Fox Interactive is touted as the "family guide to video games" and offers reviews, warnings and suggested products. Under the umbrella company of What They Like, What They Play uses the "Entertainment Software Rating Board" (ESRB) to warn parents of games containing explicit lyrics, cartoon violence and drug references.