Share your iPhone app recommendations with Appsfire

appsfirelogo One of the great things about iPhone apps is telling everyone about the ones you like as well as discovering what your friends like.

Here’s a new service that lets you use email and social media to share your recommendations in a way that’s far more useful and effective than simply talking or tweeting about an app and linking to its website or iTunes location.

Appsfire does it better. You run a little program on your PC or Mac which scans what iPhone apps you have installed. Then, you go to your private area on the Appsfire website, select the apps presented as icons on a mock-up iPhone you want to ‘fave’, and choose how you want to share.

appsfirefaves In my first go with Appsfire, I chose to create the widget you see (screenshot) here. [Later update: the widget has some odd behaviour so I’ve removed it and replaced it with the screenshot you now see. Click on the screenshot, or here, to go to the webpage at Appsfire with the widget.]

The widget itself is dynamic – you can click on any icon and it will take you to that app’s place in the App Store on iTunes where you can download and install it there and then (and if an app requires you to purchase it, you can do that). Use the scroll bar to see more.

You can also share the widget via social networks (currently, Twitter, Facebook and Delicious and as a link to the webpage.) and email. I tried that with Facebook, clicking the link in my private page. Nothing seemed to happen, though, and I don’t know if anything appeared on Facebook: nothing’s in my profile (the app didn’t ask me to login to Facebook so no surprise) and I see nothing in the Appsfire Facebook page.

Appsfire is in beta. That’s apparent to me as the apps you see in the widget aren’t all the ones I count as faves. No FT app, for instance. Nor Sky News or WSJ. Appsfire didn’t index those and quite a few more. (The email I received from Appsfire did say the Windows version might be a little flaky at the moment.)

Still, it’s early days and no doubt improvements will come. I especially would like to be able to run my ‘recommendations engine’ right from the iPhone rather than from my PC (and that’s in the pipeline).

Incidentally, if you hover your mouse over the links to the apps I just mentioned, you’ll  note they’re short URLs rather than the lengthy ones typical of iTunes App Store links.

appfirelink

That’s a good demo of Appfire’s Link Maker service which shortens iTunes links. Useful – 22 characters instead of the 80 in a typical iTunes link.

Appsfire has a video on youTube that shows you what their service can do for you. ReadWriteWeb has a good review including an interview with Appsfire co-founder Ouriel Ohayon.

I think Appsfire has a great deal of promise in how it (is planned to) connect you easily with your community on your social networks. Worth asking for a beta invitation.

Neville Hobson

Social Strategist, Communicator, Writer, and Podcaster with a curiosity for tech and how people use it. Believer in an Internet for everyone. Early adopter (and leaver) and experimenter with social media. Occasional test pilot of shiny new objects. Avid tea drinker.

  1. Ouriel Ohayon

    This is an impressive and very detailed review. we indeed still have a lot of products improvements to bring on the table including on our widget which sometimes conflicts with the CSS of some blogs.

    The facebook sharing should simply publish a link to your newsfeed. We ll check on our side if there is something wrong.

    Glad that our windows version worked though. We have an iPhone app coming (once approved by Apple) and we hope you ll enjoy even more

    Ouriel Ohayon
    AppsFire.com

    • neville

      Thanks Ouriel. I think Appsfire is very exciting: the idea of being able to connect specific recommendations with people I’m connected with, right from the iPhone, is just great. Can’t wait to see the iPhone app!

  2. Michael Litman

    This is great. I came across Appsfire over the weekend and thought it looked brilliant, great review Neville.

    Will be checking it out again in greater detail for sure.

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