I have a half written post doing a comparison of the various social gaming platforms on the iPhone, and then Apply goes and announced (link via Engadget) Game Center today during their show-and-tell for iPhone OS 4.0 and essentially sounds the death knell for all of them. Because let’s face it, when Apple joins the fray (for good or ill), especially on their own device, everyone else is shit out of luck. With a friends list, leaderboards, achievements and even multiplayer matchmaking they have all of the ingredients that draw users to social gaming networks. Xbox Live is the gold standard in the console space and I can say with relative certainty that Apple will quickly take that crown in the mobile space. OpenFient, Plus+ and Scoreloop will need to do something aboslutely amazing to beat was is essentially going to be built in functionality on all future iPhones.
My advice: quit now, and go sell knit hats or something.
Let me start by admitting that I have a problem. I like iPhone Apps. I like downloading them. I like using them. I like bitching about how shitty they are. I like deleting them and leaving 1 start ratings. I pretty much like everything about them. I’ve downloaded hundreds, come really close to maxing out my 11 home screens and I’m always looking for new ones to play with. So the idea of an app that recommends other apps to me is pretty much crack dipped in chocolate to me. My new favorite is Chomp.
Chomp is one of a handful of recommendation apps that I’ve found. Others that I’ve tried, and ultimately discarded, are Chorus, AppMiner, BargainBin, and PandoraBox. The latter three are primarily discount and sale finders so they may not be directly comparable, but Chorus is billed as a recommendation network very similar to the Chomp. I had high hopes for Chorus. You had a friends list so you could get recommendations from friends. There’s a concept of “feeds” that my assumption was you could subscribe to and get turned on to things you may not find otherwise. There’s a feed for friends and an All feed that originally I figured was just any and all recommendations by Chorus users, sort of like the Twitter public timeline. That’s not really the case though. I really have no idea what the All feed is in Chorus. But in general it’s crap. The interface design on Chorus is mostly poo as well. It takes about twenty seven clicks to see a list of reviews of a specific app. The app uses a white on black design that always puts me off from the start. And the “App Mavens” in general, are douche bags. Basically Chomp succeeds in just about all of the areas that Chorus fails for me.
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