It’s here! It’s clear! It’s the apply named AppUseful, the Yelp of social media applications.
Just login with your AppUseful account or with Facebook Connect, and you’re magically transformed from a disgruntled social media fanatic to a pithy tech reviewer with a vengeance. Remember that time in 2008 when you couldn’t get a beta invite for that one startup? Here’s your chance to let it all out.
Reviews are limited to 255 characters right now; I suggest complaining to the creators and having that stipulation removed.
Here’s why we find this interesting: There’s an awful lot of back-channel chatter and blog pontification about any social media app. Gauging overall public response is a matter of either guesswork or metrics analytics, neither of which are our particular specialty. For startups, for journalists, and for users, it’s helpful to know what people are saying without having to troll all around the Internet to find out.
As an aside to the AppUseful creators: Since the site is new and there’s not a lot of UGC for the time being, how about fleshing it out with quotes from and links to bloggers’ reviews for the time being?
Second, AppUseful is a catalog of the social web that can direct users to new apps they might find, well, useful. E.g., I want to know more about how musicians can market themselves online. AppUseful has a music category. I already knew about Last.fm and Pandora, but what about Grooveshark? If the word in the user review is that it’s more useful and flexible and allows indie musicians to sell tracks, then it’s right up my alley. And I might not have heard of it otherwise.
With featured (Bing, Wolfram Alpha), recent (Google Wave), and popular (Gmail, Digg) sections, user-oriented discovery and review of apps is simple and fun. Also, it takes a lot less time than trolling tech blogs and flaming the comments because a particular beta app didn’t work for you.
