Created by gaming site Nimblebit's Ian Marsh, App Classics analyzes iTunes rating and sales information to determine which applications have remained popular over time. The apps that make the cut are then awarded either a gold, silver or bronze medal based on their status.

The interface to the site is similar to that of the social network for bookworms, Shelfari or the iPhone app Classics (iTunes link) which displays classic novels as books on a bookshelf. Like those, App Classics features a wooden bookshelf where the icons for the applications are displayed and labeled by name. A drop-down menu at the top lets you filter the shelves by category (games, business, social networking, etc.). The "Games" category is even sub-divided into further sections (strategy, board, card, etc.).

Video Reviews Rock, but Missing Apps Don't

Click on any of the apps and you'll be taken to the app's page where you're provided with information similar to that which the App Store provides - screenshots and descriptions.

However, the best part about the app subpages is the video reviews. Using videos pulled from YouTube, you can actually see the app in action. Watching YouTube videos is something many users often do before buying a new application - this just makes it easier. 

And, as it's rapidly becoming par for the course these days, you can also share your findings via Twitter and Facebook. 

So how does App Classics stand up in terms of selection? For the most part, OK. The apps featured on the site do seem to reflect those that are deserving of "classic" status, but there are some glaring omissions as well. For example, under social networking, Facebook isn't listed. Under news, there's no Wall Street Journal. Under weather, there's no Weather Bug. We find it hard to believe that these apps weren't worthy of inclusion - were the reviews really so bad?

We're Watching this One

It could be just a case of new launch bugs - after all, App Classics was only unveiled yesterday. Given time, they may work out these kinks so true "classics" don't get overlooked.

Again, this is another site that hasn't mastered the perfect formula, unfortunately, but definitely one whose concept and implementation is to be admired. We'll say it's worth watching for now, but it's not there just yet.

To conduct the research, Kostakos worked with a large sample of online ratings. As MIT's Technology Review reports, the researcher and his team studied hundreds of thousands of items and millions of votes across all three sites. In each and every case, they discovered that small numbers of users accounted for the largest number of ratings. For example, on Amazon, only 5% of active Amazon users ever cast votes on more than 10 products but a small handful of users voted on hundreds of items. Said Kostakos, "if you have two or three people voting 500 times, the results may not be representative of the community overall."

This is hardly the first time that the so-called "wisdom of the crowds" has been called into question. The term, which implies that a diverse collection of individuals makes more accurate decisions and predications than individuals or even experts, has been used in the past to describe how everything from Wikipedia to user-generated news sites like Digg.com offer better services than anything created by a smaller group could do.

Of course, we now know that simply isn't true. For one thing, Wikipedia isn't written and edited by the "crowd" at all. In fact, 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits. Even Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers."

And as for Digg.com, a site whose algorithm is constantly tweaked in attempts to democratize the votes of its users, it still remains a place where a handful of power users can make or break getting a news item to the site's front page.

Attempts to Address the Issue

It's not surprising then to discover that, when it comes to review sites, it's again small groups that are in control there too. Some sites, including Amazon, attempt to address this discrepancy by allowing users to vote on the helpfulness of reviews - a much easier process than having to write a review yourself. Also, local business finder and recommendations site Yelp implemented ways for business owners to respond to what they feel are inaccurate reviews by way of an owner comments feature. Unfortunately, despite these efforts, the small groups still remain in control of these so-called "popular opinion" features.

According to the article, another professor at CMU, Niki Kittur, suggested that sites create new tools for transparency. For example, there should be an easy way to see a summary of a user's contributions which would quickly reveal any bias. He also suggested removing overly positive and negative reviews.

Earlier this year, we looked at another user-generated review site which attacked this problem from another angle. Lunch.com, a new Yelp competitor, uses something they call their "Similarity Network" which matches you to other site users who share your interests. That way, instead of looking at a list of reviews which could originate from anyone with an agenda or axe to grind, you're focused on reviews from others like you.

Still, there is yet to be a perfect solution to the problem. Perhaps it's time we give up the idea that the "wisdom of the crowds" was ever a driving force behind any socialized, user-generated anything and realize that, just like in life, there will always be active participants as well as the passive passerbys.

Yelp + Digg + Foursquare = GraffitiGeo

GraffitiGeo's first mobile application will initially suffer from all the usual problems of sites and services that rely on user-generated reviews. Until enough people start using the service, there won't be much value to it. While the concept behind the mobile review app is solid, its focus primarily on restaurants at the moment means it's not likely to attract a large user base right off the bat. There are already a large number of mobile restaurant applications out there, not to mention there's Yelp, which does restaurant reviews and a lot more.

The GraffitiGeo team acknowledges they have competition in this area, but are quick to point out the others' shortcomings. For example, Yelp reviews are too long - especially in "the day and age of Twitter," they write on their blog. They also incorporate the Digg-like voting element for fast rankings (which Yelp does not), offer Facebook Connect integration for easy sign in, introduce nifty heatmaps to highlight the hotspots, and let you leave a comment with only 2 taps (Yelp takes 5-6). In short, they feel they've designed an application specifically for the mobile platform where Yelp just ported their successful website to mobile instead.

The Digg-like voting aspect is probably the app's killer feature. Instead of star ratings or lengthy reviews, you can simply vote "thumbs up" in order to rate a restaurant positively or a "thumbs down" if you're not so pleased. This ease-of-use makes the barrier to entry that much lower and could encourage more participation from casual users.

Another element to GraffitiGeo is the game aspect. This may or may not be a plus, in our opinion. With inspiration obviously borrowed from mobile social network/game Foursquare, GraffitiGeo awards points for any activity, whether that's a vote, a comment, or anything else. After reaching 100 points (aka "street cred"), you can start or join a "mob." Not a violent mob, of course, just a "mob." Mobs can claim territories which, in turn, unlocks more features in the application. There are also badges which can be earned. The entire setup is explained here. It's a bit complex and frankly, we're not sure if this is the sort of app that needs a gameplay element. If you're trying to find out if a restaurant is worth trying out, you're probably more interested in reading reviews and checking ratings than you are in playing with a bunch of online friends.

Even Better: An Augmented Reality Version

The real trick up GraffitiGeo's sleeve, however, is the app that's yet to come. Basically, the next app from GraffitiGeo is an augmented reality version of what's described above. That sounds much more appealing, to be honest. With the iPhone's viewfinder, you scan the restaurant in question and GraffitiGeo comments will float across your screen. What's really cool about the AR app, though, is that you don't necessarily have to have a restaurant in the viewfinder to see these ratings. Because the app is location-based, it knows what's nearby. In the demo, they aim the app down the street from where they're standing and GraffitiGeo displays the ratings for all the restaurants on that block. If you're ever just wandering around looking for a place to eat, this could be a real timesaver. We imagine you'll then be able to interact with the app in other ways, too, but that's hard to tell from the YouTube video demo.

GraffitiGeo's first effort may or may not be worth your time, especially considering its already robust competition, but the AR app definitely looks worth the wait.

Just login with your AppUseful account or with Facebook Connect, and you're magically transformed from a disgruntled social media fanatic to a pithy tech reviewer with a vengeance. Remember that time in 2008 when you couldn't get a beta invite for that one startup? Here's your chance to let it all out.

Here's why we find this interesting: There's an awful lot of back-channel chatter and blog pontification about any social media app. Gauging overall public response is a matter of either guesswork or metrics analytics, neither of which are our particular specialty. For startups, for journalists, and for users, it's helpful to know what people are saying without having to troll all around the Internet to find out.

As an aside to the AppUseful creators: Since the site is new and there's not a lot of UGC for the time being, how about fleshing it out with quotes from and links to bloggers' reviews for the time being?

Second, AppUseful is a catalog of the social web that can direct users to new apps they might find, well, useful. E.g., I want to know more about how musicians can market themselves online. AppUseful has a music category. I already knew about Last.fm and Pandora, but what about Grooveshark? If the word in the user review is that it's more useful and flexible and allows indie musicians to sell tracks, then it's right up my alley. And I might not have heard of it otherwise.

With featured (Bing, Wolfram Alpha), recent (Google Wave), and popular (Gmail, Digg) sections, user-oriented discovery and review of apps is simple and fun. Also, it takes a lot less time than trolling tech blogs and flaming the comments because a particular beta app didn't work for you.

Why We Need This

Sites like Yelp, Amazon, the iTunes store, and others have been coming under fire for not having trustworthy reviews. Thanks to anonymous user IDs on some sites, reviewers can be anyone with any agenda. Often they are. On Lunch, however, those drive-by reviews contributed by someone associated with the company or product being reviewed (or with an axe to grind) will not be prominently featured. The reason? Lunch.com's Similarity Network.

The Similarity Network

The Similarity Network is probably the most important feature of this new community - without it, Lunch would just be just another Yelp. After signing up, you kick start the matching engine by playing "ExhilaRATE." Although that name is somewhat unintuitive, clicking the link takes you to a section of the site where you can - guess what? - rate things like movies, books, food, sports, politics, animals...whatever. The experience of rating items here is a lot like that of Amazon's recommendation engine. If you've ever killed a few minutes on Amazon training it to get to know you better, you'll find Lunch.com's engine fairly similar.

The difference is that Lunch.com's engine groups things to rate into categories with titles that sound a lot like Facebook Apps (Top Movies of 2009, What's your Favorite Wine?). The Facebook flavor to these "games" makes sense because in the future, Lunch.com will launch a Facebook connected-experience, perhaps even a standalone app. In the meantime, however, you must go to the site to rate items.

The more you rate on Lunch, the better your matches become. You can see your matches and the percentage of compatibility between you and those like you. There are also tag cloud displays that show what items you both like and which ones you don't.

With Lunch, You Can Rate Anything

If you're still wondering why you would migrate away from more mainstream sites to something like Lunch.com, there's another reason this particular community holds appeal: it allows you to make anything ratable. Again unlike Yelp, ratings don't have to focus on products, services, places, etc. They could also be opinion pieces - like what you thought of Michelle Obama's new outfit for example. That opens the door for a much wider range of recommendations and - since you're matched with those like you - those recommendations will be relevant to your interests.

Lunch.com is in private beta, but you can try it now with the invite code "ReadWriteWeb." To use it, just click the link on the right-hand side of the screen that says "Have an invite code?"

]]>Discuss]]>

Was MemoryUp a "Rogue" Application?

Whether or not MemoryUp actually destroyed personal data and spammed people's contacts, as it was said to have done, is unknown. However, it would have been difficult for it to have accomplished those things. The app required no special privileges to install, so it's hard to imagine how it could have accessed the data and email addresses or how it could have sent out the spam. Also, for what it's worth, the company behind the app adamantly denies the claims. Says Robert Lee, chief technical associate for eMobiStudio, "We are very disturbed by these reports. Whatever damage is out there has not been done by our product."

...Or a Victim of Community Backlash?

The truth about this application may be that it just wasn't very good, not that it was dangerous malware. Many comments about the app in the Android store (prior to the app's removal) and in the forums weren't about losing data but about how the app wasn't worth installing because it provided no real value to the user.

What's even more apparent, though, in reading through the posts and comments about MemoryUp, is that many members of the Android community seemed to have a grudge against the app's creator, Peter Liu, whose drive-by advertising in forum postings got under people's skin. "How many times are you going to advertise this on here?" wrote one user. Later, others bragged and joked about running the "Memory folks out of town." "Peter needs to get a life," said yet another user.

It stands to reason that a handful of Android community members decided to disparage the application to get back at the app's developer...but something like that could never be proven, only suspected.

Yet, if that was the case, those people inadvertently ended up hurting Android in the process. By raising questions about the safety and security of Android platform, they helped to spread "FUD" (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) about this new mobile OS. Even worse, these rumors make the iPhone's closed and "by approval only" model look like the safer, smarter choice when it comes to phones. But as anyone involved in the open movement will tell you, that is not necessarily the case.

You can fine the new beta at beta.citysearch.com.

More Local

Besides giving the service a cleaner and more modern look, Citysearch also retooled the back-end to allow users to perform more granular searches. While the old Citysearch was only focused on 140 metropolitan areas, the new version allows you to drill down to the neighborhood level.

Social

The new version of Citysearch puts more emphasis on the social experience by highlighting reviews from your Facebook friends while browsing through reviews. Besides making the sign-in easier for new users, Citysearch now also allows you to publish your updates on the service to your Facebook profile. On the service itself, setting up a profile has now become easier, though you can't really do too much with these profiles besides adding your profile picture.

Users can now also vote reviews up or down, which is a nice feature, given that some reviews can be blatantly biased.

The update also puts more emphasis on professionally produced videos of local establishments. The new player, which is provided by BrightCove, allows for wide-screen HD playback, which is a nice upgrade from the old version.

Mobile

Early next year, Citysearch will start to allow users to upload their own photos and videos to the service. Citysearch also expects to release a native iPhone application around the same time, though for now, the updated mobile site is already quite useful.

Overall, this is a nice update to Citysearch and puts the service back on par with its competitors. In the mobile market, however, review services like Yelp or discovery services like Whrll have a head-start and it will be interesting to see if Citysearch's mobile site can compete with these.

The first service to feature BooRah's data is Kosmix.com, a small semantic search engine that now prominently displays BooRah ratings and data for most restaurant related searches.

Competition

Yelp, BooRah's most direct competitor, also features a comprehensive set of APIs and developers have already made good use of it while developing mobile applications, especially on the iPhone. The availability of these APIs has given Yelp a clear boost in the past.

BooRah is playing catch-up here, but it does have enough features to differentiate itself from its competition and this API is a step in the right direction. The only feature that seems missing from the API to make it even more useful is the ability to send reviews to BooRah directly.

Customers of the App Store will be in for a rude awakening if they try to review an app without purchasing it first. Customers intending to do so will encounter the following error message:

When checking out reviews of App Store apps, we've all seen the comments about fake reviews. The App Store's review system has helped perpetuate itself into a free for all buffet for spam and phony reviews. Users were welcome to leave any comment they wish with no consequences. Needless to say, Apple is looking to stop this from happening in the future.

A Step in the Right Direction

While, this won't quell more problematic concerns with the App Store, developers will appreciate the new restriction. Fake reviews can cause developers serious head-aches. These fake reviews are usually negative or positive depending on numerous factors such as developer popularity and overall community opinion. Developers won't have to worry about fake bad press or fake positive reviews. Apple is hopying that this new restriction will stop the App Store from being more of a popularity contest, than a useful center for information.

What's On iPhone?

What'soniphone is not only a great iTunes apps review site, but also a great web apps review site. With a team of engineers, writers, medical professionals, culinary artists, home makers, What's on iPhone will help anyone decide on an app. Reviews start off with an overview of the application and follows up with their personal take on the app, a mini review, and the final verdict.

iUseThis

If you not only want reviews of an app, but also want to know how many people are really using it, iUseThis is your site. You can register for iUseThis to keep a log of all the apps you're using. However, the site is best for finding out the most popular of two apps. For example, if you're trying to make a decision between two or three note-taking applications and wanted to know which one may have been downloaded the most, iUseThis is a great place to find out.

AppVee

AppVee is a recently launched application review site. AppVee aims to do things a little differently by providing users with a personal review of the app and also ratings for the apps. Ratings range from ease of use and features to the app's user interface. I've already spotted quite a few app reviews that I haven't seen elsewhere on AppVee.

Apple iPhone School

Apple iPhone School is a great app review site for both the App Store apps and jailbroken apps via Cydia. There's a great selection of app reviews currently available for both sources. If you're looking for a particular app review check out the site's sidebar for categories and more.

More Than Enough

Now you'll never have to complain about needed more reviews for an app. With over 4 sources including the iTunes App Store itself, you're all set to make a safe decision on whether or not to buy a particular app. Did we miss any sites? Let us know what your favorite iTunes App review sites are!

Finding the right apartment to live in can be a daunting and time consuming task. Introin tries to make this process easier by creating a platform where prospective renters can communicate with current residents. Current residents can earn referral bonuses from their rental complex when they convince a prospective renter to move to their complex. Introit also gives renters the opportunity to advertise their own apartments for subleasing.

Introin currently only has listings available for the United States, but there, it does seem to have a relatively complete list of apartment complexes. What makes the site a lot less useful, though, is the fact that the search functions are extremely basic, to say the least. Other sites focused on the rental market like ForRent.com or Rent.com allow you to filter your search by everything from available fireplaces, to pools, and pet policies. Even Apartmentratings.com, which mostly focuses on reviews, allows for searching by number of beds and baths, as well as maximum rent.

Introin, on the other hand, only features a location based search and an option to search by name. That's it. After the search is completed, you are presented with an alphabetical list that can only be sorted by number of referrals. The information Introin displays about apartment complexes is about as spare as its search functions and doesn't go beyond name, address, and phone number. There are no photos, no links to a complex's web site, not even an indication about the cost of renting there. There is a button that says 'show details,' but it's inactive.

Connecting Renters

Even though the search presents a pretty bare list of information, this is the central hub for renters to connect. You can add your own information here to be listed as a referral and you can list your apartment as being available for sublease. At least in the sublease form, you can start entering some information about your place. You can not, however, upload any pictures.

Once a connection between renters has been made, the communication between them is then handled on the site on a message board. If there are no subleases or referrers available yet, you can set an alert and you will get an email once somebody else signs up for referring or subleasing.

Conflict of Interest?

If current renters, though, are mostly motivated by referral bonuses, the question remains if their opinions can be fully trusted. Many complexes offer bonuses close to $300 or a certain number of rent-free weeks. Introin doesn't feature any reputation system. This is problematic in a system that has a conflict of interest built into it by default.

What if Nobody Shows Up?

The problem for Introin right now isn't this potential conflict of interest, though. The problem Introin faces right now is one that many community sites face in its early stages: it's empty. In all my searches, I have yet to come across a single apartment available for sub-lease or a users who registered as a referral.

Introin is probably most useful in areas around college campuses where people move in and out on a regular basis and somebody is always looking to sub-lease apartments for the semester breaks or after dropping out of school. Here, however, Introin also faces stiff competition from long established local sites and, of course, Craigslist.

Verdict

Introin is build upon a very interesting idea. If the developers tackle some of the problems outlined above and start adding more information to the system so that the search function becomes more useful, then this service would have potential. Right now, there is simply a lack of activity on the site and the fact that the search is so limited reduces its usefulness to the point where it would be hard to refer anybody to the site with a clean conscience.

It's a small but interesting site and the basic premise here is something that could be expanded beyond restaurants alone, something the company says it intends to do. I like it a lot.

BooRah uses affiliate services to display menus, make reservations and offer big discounts for restaurants in a long list of cities. These added features are a very nice touch, especially the menu display from AllMenus.com.

Semantic Analysis

The reviews that get processed are identified by semantic analysis identifying food blogs among 100,000 blogs being indexed. That number could be bigger, but it's unclear what percentage of those indexed blogs are in fact food blogs.

Inside the review excerpts you'll find food terms, like a particular dish, identified and linked out to a search results page displaying that same item in the same location you're currently looking at. That's really nice, so if I'm reading a review that says some place's dolmas are alright but aren't the best in town - I'm one click on the word dolmas away from finding out where in town is said to have better ones. Yelp lets you search for terms in a city of course, but making it one click automatically is nice.

I wrote a review this morning and the parsing is a little funky. The key term in my review is "raw," which should be discernible since the culinary category is "organic." Instead, BooRah pulls out a link to "cooked stuff" for searching. That's the opposite of what a user would want in this, admittedly niche case. Food, like many other niche topics, needs strong long-tail analysis - doesn't it? Maybe it's unrealistic to expect semantic analysis to be strong in outlying, long-tail use cases - perhaps full text search ala Google is going to serve said user better. I hope not, though.

Yelp doesn't do a lot of what BooRah does. The final bit of semantics I found on the site was a "semantic cloud" for selected cities. That gives you a good idea what kinds of foods and issues people are talking the most about for a given location and lets you click through to read those reviews.

Further Differentiation

The site searches for reviews across a lot of different sources, depending on the location. Yelp is not included, which is a real shame, but sites like CitySearch, Yahoo Travel, Tripadvisor and many more are included. In some locations the local newspaper website is included in review sources. You can easily filter between sources or chose to just look at food review blogs.

Reviews can also be written on the BooRah site itself. When you sign up for an account you're prompted to select between 3 different charities, presumably ad revenue you generate will be shared with those charities. That's a nice touch. I don't see Yelp doing that, do you?

RSS feeds for new reviews of restaurants in a particular city? I'll subscribe to that! I'd like to have some more granular control of such a feed: new reviews, new restaurants or new restaurants with 3 or more reviews. Yelp has pretty limited RSS feeds.

Finally, the Boos and the Rah's are probably the biggest differentiator here. It is hard for systems like this to recognize things like sarcasm or other peculiarities of human communication - but BooRah seems to be doing a fairly good job in the little bit that I looked around it. I really like the way it pulls out emotive quotes from reviews. My initial skepticism has subsided, but I'll be keeping a close eye on this feature as I use the site more.

Seeing positive and negative reviews around three different parts of a restaurant (food, service and ambience) really is far better than just seeing a number of stars. This method of displaying reviews scales for the individual user, far better than stars and full text reviews do.

The Down Sides

BooRah has been around for a little while but it still feels like its database could be better fleshed out. The user experience is very good, but (for example) the slideshow viewer is broken right now. I don't know about on the iPhone, but on Windows Mobile the site is effectively unusable for me. That's a real shame, as Yelp Mobile is fantastic.

Not including Yelp in the reviews being indexed seems like a pretty big downside. Maybe most of the world doesn't need to read the musings of the yuppie restaurant-philanderer 2.0 crowd, but as one of those myself - I like Yelp reviews. At the same time, it is nice to read what the rest of the world has to say too. In fact, I'm going to try using BooRah instead of Yelp for awhile - when I'm at home on my laptop at least.

Shortcomings aside, combination of semantic indexing and natural language sentiment-processing is a very interesting one. I look forward to BooRah getting better and bringing the same strategy and feature-richness to other niche topics.

Disclosure: I have a consulting relationship with a somewhat related, still-unlaunched, service provider.

It's already proven to be a great way to make more informed purchases in the periodical section of your local bookstore, I look forward to using it now to find gems buried in the flood of content available on these social media sites.

Review writers sign up with their Paypal addresses for payment, then claim "assignments" by source or topic area. Up to three reviewers can claim an assignment and each assignment has a deadline before which the review must be submitted. The assignment desk shows a fair amount of reviewer activity so far, though see further discussion of user adoption below.

The whole Brijit site is very elegant in its design and user experience. I love the ability to view the highest rated business stories in the past week, for example. I really like the whole site, in fact. Brijit is one of my favorite services that's launched in the last year. If you're an intellectually curious person who subscribes to too many magazines and doesn't find time to read the best articles, or who likes a good national newspaper and a cup of coffee on the weekends - I think you'll like Brijit too.

The addition of online social media sites is a smart one. Brijit says they will use an algorithm to discover the most interesting articles and videos to assign to reviewers. Bringing the Brijit community of well-read smarties into an editorial position relative to YouTube videos, for example, sounds like a great way to discover the really high-value videos on the site.

Seeking the Nerd Network Effect

The one down-side to Brijit is that it will be a real challenge to grow. Reading a full article on a time schedule and writing a thoughtful review, even if only 100 words, is not an easy task. That's why sites like YouTube, Digg and Techmeme leverage the simplest actions possible by their users to determine what's hot. Brijit would be a much better site if its userbase was much larger and there were multiple reviews on each item, as the company clearly hopes will happen. The company told us it saw "40% month-over-month growth for the first half of April versus the first half March" and that user growth is "accelerating." That's good news.

That said, even with small numbers of users it's a fun site to use. Small numbers of users will not sustain the kind of growth that will make $5 payments per review viable over the long term, but with enough growth and presumably some high-end advertising in the future - hopefully this site can thrive.

Below is a widget displaying the most recent items on Brijit that I've saved for later reading, just one of a number of nice little features you'll find on the site.