Tweet about iPhone apps? AppStoreHQ has personalized app recommendations for YOU!
Back in October we released our Twitter Hottest list - a constantly-updated look at the iPhone apps currently getting the most attention on Twitter. Since that release, we’ve logged more than 100,000 app-related Tweets from more than 10,000 people. We also track the app preferences of our registered members with our “loved” and “bookmark” features, adding tens of thousands more ‘votes’ to our pool of social data about iPhone apps.
As these counts kept climbing, we started wondering: in addition to our generalized view of the top apps in blogs or on Twitter, couldn’t we also offer a personalized recommendations service for iPhone apps based on our growing social data set? We started playing around with various approaches to collaborative filtering and quickly found that we could begin to offer relevant individual app recommendations based on just a single data point (i.e., one app-related Tweet or bookmark), with steady improvement as more actions are added. Given the difficulty of finding useful and relevant iPhone apps, we knew we were on to something.
After testing this feature behind the scenes for a while we’ve decided it’s ready for its close-up. Effective today, AppStoreHQ now offers personalized iPhone app recommendations to anyone who tweets about iPhone apps, in any language, anywhere in the world. These recommendations are based on the largest set of social data about iPhone apps outside of iTunes itself, a dataset that grows every time someone, somewhere tweets about their new favorite app.
How do you get your own set of personalized iPhone app recommendations? It’s easy:
- Tweet about the apps you love
- Include the iTunes link (or a link to the AppStoreHQ detail page for the app) - shortened URLs are expected and work just fine
- Make sure to include *one* of the following keywords / hashtags in your tweet:
- iPhone / #iPhone
- iPhone app / #iPhoneapp
- iPhone apps / #iPhoneapps
- AppStoreHQ / #AppStoreHQ
- Visit your personal page on AppStoreHQ - based on your Twitter username - anytime to view your current recommendations (we turn new tweets into structured data every hour or so and update our recommendation calculations daily)
Here’s what a personal recommendations page looks like:
In addition to recommendations by person, we also turned our social recommendations engine on its side to offer information about each application. Love a particular app and want to see who else shares your views? Look for the “Fans” photostrip on any AppStoreHQ app detail page - here’s what it looks like:
You can click through to view each person’s recent app-related tweets and recommendations and, if you like their style, visit their Twitter profile to follow them directly.
We’re incredibly excited about this new capability and hope you are too. If you have suggestions or questions about our new social recommendations feature (or anything else), please drop us a line.
