A big problem for the nearly half a million apps available in the Apple App store is that they each lack an easily shareable social narrative that would empower users to buy.
San Francisco-based Kinetik, is trying to solve that problem and today launched an app-sharing application for the iPhone that looks at what your friends and potential friends are using and makes suggestions based on those apps to you.
More than 450,000 apps are available to the 200 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users worldwide. “Nobody has the time to sort out 450,000 apps. It’s really easy for them to see an activity, like what their friends are using,” says Kinetik COO Juan Moreno.
Kinetik lets users choose an app, add a short comment and share it across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It enables users to follow friends to see recent apps shared, organizes these shared apps by popularity, and arranges apps by categories like Games, Music and Photography.
Kinetik’s People section shows who to follow based on the apps a user has in common with other app users. It also gives each user a profile so that they can broadcast to friends the apps they are using. The closest thing to it would be companies like GetGlue and Flingo, which do a similar thing for Web and entertainment content.
I’ve tried the app. The signup process was a little annoying, because it asks for you to login through Twitter and supply them an email address. I don’t like giving an email address, because I am wary of spam. I could immediately see what my friends were using and that even introduced a couple of apps that I had never seen before, so, check, that works.
The friend suggestions were both compelling and slightly disappointing. I could follow potential “friends,” but the problem was that they had no apps so I could not understand the relevancy. Why were they being suggested? I think this may be because the app is new.
Kinetik has reached number 50 in the ranking for apps downloaded in the social media category since it launched early this morning, according to Moreno. As more people use it, it may really make good on that social narrative relevancy claim.
