The Apple App Store

14 07 2008

Quite exciting that Apple has injected quite a jolt into the software development community vein by opening up the iPhone API and App Store. Despite some birth pains, it’s looking to be a smashing hit. And why not? Take the best phone platform out there, a cool idea, some developer brains, mix them up together and you could potentially get a boatload of moolah. Note to self: it might be a good idea to try to get on that bus.

Speaking of birth pains, there’s been some news about unfair practices in the app store. Sheesh, this is easy. Do a Yahoo and pull another page out of the Facebook book (Facebook book? uh, sorry) by displaying the applications in “smart-random” view, just like how when you click on “Show all friends” on a friend’s profile shows you all that person’s friends using some criteria (may be connected to you in some way, part of a group, attended the same school, etc), but it looks random so that you don’t always see people named “Wachowski” up to “Zimmerman” in the 50th page or so.





Yahoo Doing A Facebook?

11 07 2008

While not exactly similar to what Facebook did with their API, this is still a page out of the same book. It’s pretty exciting, and depending on if they do it right, can make a huge impact on their positioning. It’s still in the planning stage, but if it can leverage the brainpower in the community and lower the barrier for entry, it’s got the potential to be a smash hit.