williamweber.net

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.

To start Chomp recommends a handful apps to you based on your previous reviews or if you’re just starting it picks from the most popular to get you started. You can filter by category, by free or paid apps, or just see everything at once. Reviews are simple. You either like an app or you don’t. There isn’t a scale like most things in the world. You just give an app a yes or no rating with an optional one line comment. When you bring up a particular app in Chomp there’s a simple bar that shows how many of the total number of reviews were positive and how many were negative so it just takes a glance to see which way the tide is going on an app.

The community aspect of the app is very similar to Twitter. You can follow other people to see the stuff they’re recommending or avoiding. Best of all there’s a section for Live App Reviews. This is basically the Twitter public timeline of Chomp. Every review that goes though Chomp shows up in this area. So if you’re a little crazy, like me, you can refresh it every few minutes to see if anything interesting pops up. There’s also a list of people called App Celebrities that are taken from the user base on a weekly basis. Some seem to be permanent but for the most part the list does change from week to week, which gives you can get a random taste of what someone else is reviewing.

The one thing that irritates me a little bit is that not nearly enough people use the optional one line comment. The comment limit is even smaller than twitter’s 140 characters so it really doesn’t take much to jot something down about the app you’re reviewing. The thing I like best about the thumbs-up, thumbs-down system is that you get away from that irritating 3 start syndrome. Where boring people who can’t make a decision just give things three out of five because they sort of liked it but this-that-and-the-other-thing didn’t do it for them. Well for me, that’s either a “this was good but needs work,” Thumbs-Up with a one line comment about the thing that bothered me, or a “this was junk, but could be good,” a Thumbs-Down with a comment about what needs to change to make it better. I like context. I like to know that someone put at least some rudimentary thought into why they’re giving a Yay or Nay vote. If they’re aren’t commenting I normally just assume it’s some automated process trying to farm for sales.