According to Mplayit CEO Michael Powers, the size of a mobile platform’s app store is now mostly irrelevant. Facebook-based mobile app store Mplayit took a close look at the most popular apps for Android, BlackBerry and the iPhone and found that the most popular apps on all three platforms tend to be very similar. As the popular app stores continue to grow, users on all the major platforms also drift towards the same known brands and hits like EverNote and Pandora. Sponsor Mplayit also found that one of the fastest growing app categories across all the major platforms are barcode scanners. Apps like ShopSavvy and RedLaser have clearly hit upon an unfulfilled need. Size Doesn’t Matter According to Powers, asking how many apps exist for a given platform is now a moot question. All the major platforms now offer more than enough apps and as long as people can find the apps they are looking for – and as long as these apps are good – most consumers will be happy. Most users simply don’t need 50 different apps to write their grocery lists. Looking at Mplayit’s list of the most popular apps across the top platforms, it also becomes clear that quite a few of these categories are being dominated by known brands like Shazam, Pandora, Evernote and Facebook. Mplayit, of course, is in the business of giving app recommendations across platforms and doesn’t fail to note that it’s own store is a good alternative for finding apps outside of the standard top 20 charts. Or Does It? To some degree, Powers’ comments about the size of today’s app stores rings true. Maybe it really doesn’t matter that the Android store only features about 20,000 apps and that the Apple App Store now holds more than 100,000. Maybe it is true that consumers tend to gravitate towards the same brands on all platforms. At the same time, though, having more apps in the store also means that there is a more active developer ecosystem around a given platform. While iPhone developers rightly gripe about Apple’s approval process, we’ve seen a lot more innovative apps for the iPhone than for Android. Is the size of the Android market holding you back from making the switch? Do you think Android has enough good apps that make up for the smaller app store? Do you think the quality of today’s BlackBerry apps is good enough? Feel free to let us know in the comments. Discuss

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Do the Size of Mobile App Stores Still Matter?

EMusic , the popular subscription-based music service, just announced that it has signed a deal with Warner Music, the world’s third largest music company. This is eMusic’s second deal with a major record label. In its early days, eMusic mostly focused on featuring music from independent labels. Since the middle of 2009, however, eMusic has worked on expanding its reach by bringing more mainstream music to its catalog. The company announced a deal with Sony Music in June 2008. Sponsor Today’s deal with Warner Music allows the company to add 10,000 additional albums from Warner labels like Atlantic Records and Rhino Records. Thanks to this, eMusic will now be able to feature music from artists like Eric Clapton, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Depeche Mode. EMusic has about 400,000 paying subscribers. From Quirky to Mainstream For eMusic, this transition towards featuring a catalog that focuses more on mainstream tastes has been rocky. When eMusic added the Sony Music catalog to its repertoire, the company also had to raise its subscription prices. Quite a few of eMusic’s most loyal users were unhappy with the direction the service was going in and left the service. So far, however, eMusic’s users have reacted positively about the Warner deal. Streaming Coming Soon? According to eMusic CEO Danny Stein, the company also wants to offer a streaming music service in the near future. Stein told Reuters that the company still has to work out deals with the respective rights holders, though. Given that Apple just bought streaming music service LaLa, it probably doesn’t come as a surprise that eMusic is also looking at streaming music. As consumers warm up to services like Pandora and LaLa, download services like LaLa and Apple’s iTunes have to react to this trend. Discuss

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Going Mainstream: eMusic Signs Deal with Warner Music

Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight

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Always Be Testing: 8 Services For Usability Feedback

I’m just aching to know if the new Apple tablet (insert caveats, weasel words and qualifiers here) is a potential Cintiq competitor. I don’t think it will be, but you never know. It may also have a built in barometer and bird call generator. I’m never sure if Apple does themselves more good than harm with the secrecy and anticipation that surrounds the run-up to these announcements. Unless there’s something truly jaw-dropping about whatever device rises from the stage when Steve Jobs reaches that particular slide in Keynote, the reaction may be muted disappointment: “Oh.” “Huh.” “Wait a minute… my life is still the same miasma of thwarted potential and spiritual anomie that it was half an hour ago!” Sponsor That said, what are you expecting on Jan. 27? More Noise to Signal. Discuss

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Cartoon: Apple Tablet: Now With Barometer and Bird Call Generator

While maybe not the most visually compelling product, Healthful Apps represents an interesting new trend for 2010. Created by Apps for All , the product recommends customer-reviewed iPhone health applications in a variety of categories including autism, relaxation and memory. Although the company’s first effort is focused on health, the larger industry-wide question remains – will this year’s branded iPhone app be a recommendation app? Sponsor Last year ReadWriteWeb covered Appsfire as one service that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite iPhone apps. While it’s certainly a useful tool, recommendations are made by individuals rather than influential groups. As seen with Healthful Apps, there’s opportunity to extend these recommendation-based applications to special-interest and location-based communities. Imagine investment communities trading and reviewing stock and news apps, or Oprah Winfrey’s community recommending shopping and reading apps, or New Yorkers sharing transportation and amenity apps. The personalization of applications by politics, lifestyle, locale and community may prove more useful in making app recommendations than any automated Genius system that Apple could hope to cook up. Additionally, because providers can monetize recommendations through paid app referral fees, it’s entirely possible that influential communities can earn money simply by weighing in with their app preferences. It’s honestly so meta that it hurts, but if social media has taught us anything, it’s that community influencers are tastemakers. If this is in fact the future, then my question to you is this – Which communities would you take recommendations from, and would you pay for the app? Discuss

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Will Recommendation Apps be the New iPhone App Hotness?

Later today, Google plans to unveil its own smartphone, the Nexus One. According to new data from research firm Forrerster’s new U.S. Omnibus Survey, Google is launching this phone at just the right time. Today, 17% of U.S. adult who subscribe to a cell phone plan use smartphones. This number is up from 11% in 2008 and 7% in 2007. Thanks to the growing importance of Android, Forrester thinks that 2010 will be “the year of the smartphone.” Sponsor Forrester’s Charles S. Golvin also notes that quick messaging devices with closed operating systems like the LG Xenon are still growing at a rapid pace as well. Currently, about 15% of adult subscribers own one of these devices. While the growth of this category slowed down somewhat over 2009, it still eclipsed that of the smartphone segment. As prices for smartphones continue to come down and as developers manage to overcome some of the usability issues of current devices, more and more users will opt for full-blown smartphones instead of quick messaging devices in the coming years. While Android and Apple’s iPhone are clearly driving the adoption of smartphones – and the Nexus One will surely play its part in this in 2010 – it’s important to note that BlackBerry still maintains its two-to-one advantage of the iPhone. The Google Phone It’ll be interesting to see how Google will market the Nexus One. Thanks to numerous early reviews , there is very little that we don’t know about the phone itself at this point. Chances are that Google has a few surprises up its sleeve for today’s announcement. After all, the company must have known that today’s press briefing would come long after all the details about the actual hardware of the phone had leaked already. Discuss

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Will 2010 Be the Year of the Smartphone?

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers. Sponsor My conclusions in the previous post still stand: 1) Google now dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market; and 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009/2010 due to Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, Firefox bookmarks, and more. However, a lot of commenters wrote that they still use RSS Readers each and every day. Here are the main reasons why: 1. Control over Information Flow RSS Readers allow users to control their flow of information , whereas it’s impossible to keep up with the Twitter firehose of real-time information. Mathew Ballad (comment 11) put it well: “I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can’t see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don’t have much control over.” It’s not just about controlling your stream of daily news. Many people have feeds that they just don’t want to miss. Tim Bray has a folder of feeds in NetNewsWire that he feels is “unacceptable when I don’t at least glance at everything those people have to say.” Some people would argue that it’s a thankless task trying to control your RSS Reader. I am one of those people who long ago gave up trying to keep my “mark all read” count at zero. Indeed I don’t even try to mark as read my email nowadays (I just let it all flow in and I mark the ones I should reply to with stars, in Gmail). On a similar point, RSS pioneer Dave Winer remarked (comment 80) that Google Reader “has the wrong view of RSS.” In a follow-up post , he wrote that “fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email,” by which I think he means users feel compelled to read everything in it. His view is that “reading every story is a meaningless concept” and that RSS Readers need to find a way around this issue. 2. Evolving User Interfaces Some readers are expecting RSS Readers to transform their UIs in 2010, in particular for “processing life and news streams in the same interface.” ( Marco A Torres ) This has already happened to a degree in Google Reader, which has many nice social sharing features. @businessquests (comment 57) called Google Reader “a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds.” Eric (comment 19) agreed, commenting: “I use it [Google Reader] not only as a constantly evolving newspaper, but to share and to create new snippets using the “Note in Reader…” bookmarklet. I also subscribe to others’ interests and see what they have marked to share with me.” Eric also noted that he gets breaking news in Google Reader, thanks to its support of the real-time standard PubSubHubbub. However a number of people complained that Google Reader isn’t evolving fast enough in terms of user experience. I would put myself in that camp too. So, like me, you may want to check out some new feed reading innovations. Feedly (one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 ), Fever (one of our Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 ) and my6sense (an iPhone app – our review ) are 3 apps that received multiple mentions from our readers. We use Fever internally at ReadWriteWeb and I just today downloaded my6sense onto my iPhone. As an aside, note that two of those apps (Feedly and my6sense) integrate Twitter as well as RSS feeds. 3. Tracking Twitter It’s not necessarily an either/or situation between RSS Readers and Twitter. Lynne Pope from New Zealand pointed out (comment 44) that she uses Google Reader to track some Twitter accounts: “Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available.” 4. Mobile News A number of people remarked that they commonly read their feeds via a mobile version of an RSS Reader. Something for those of us who are sick of being tied to PCs to do more of, perhaps. Bill (comment 46) wrote: “I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I’m rocking the baby to sleep.” 5. Categorized News Perhaps some of us are finding RSS Readers difficult to use nowadays because we don’t use them efficiently. If you spend some initial time setting up your Reader and categorizing your feeds, then chances are you will get a lot more out of it. Randy Orrison (comment 78) described a good use case that you may want to emulate: “I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC).” Conclusion Reading through all 160+ comments on my post restored some of my faith in RSS Readers. Viva la read/write Web! I’m going to test out some of the tools people suggested, find new ways to integrate Twitter streams with my RSS feeds, read more on my iPhone using my6sense and other services, and do some re-ordering in my Google Reader. What are your thoughts now about RSS Readers, given the discussion summarized here? Discuss

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5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock