Info 202 Fall 2011

Article

With the ubiqiuity of iPhones , the proliferation of iOS apps has been explosive to say the least. This presents the “app” as the essential resource to be retrieved/organized based on relevance to a particular user. Current strategy  considers the most downloaded apps as most popular and trusts the power of the crowd to come up with the optimal solution for recommending apps , which a novice iPhone user can  trust and download . This strategy is satisfactory for the general case, since generic apps which are deemed necessary , automatically bubble up to the top of the “most downloaded” list. But the constant churn of apps in the iOSphere in terms of addition of new apps and  the fading out of obsolete ones poses a problem here , as a new “relevant” app may take some time (based possibly on publicity via various means)  to warrant consideration.

Kinteik aims to organize and suggest apps  to users based on recommendations from friends, thereby bringing the social aspect of organization to the fore. It will sign-up users, who can be suggested as your “friends” and whom you can follow for app recommendations. The friends can share an app on social media like Twitter, Facebook , providing a brief description as to why they find the app relevant . Also , a category based classification is also supported based on the recommendations. Based on the feedback ,the people who follow these recommenders may be inclined to download this app. This emphasizes a distributed approach to finding the relevant app , since there can be recommendations from various “friends” , rather than the existing method of judging by the download count . Certainly there are no standards defined for what a “relevant” app is , since relevance is a subjective matter, but the matching algorithm to find users having similar apps and recommending them as “friends”  holds great promise.

The app organization system thus created by Kinetik is a user specific “filter bubble” (like the hexagonal galleries of Borges’ Library of Babel) creating a microcosm of relevant apps from the deluge of choices available at the App Store. The app organization in the users’ iPhone keeps on happening, on a voluntary basis, based on real-time recommendations and is totally governed by user interests. There is no differentiation between a user and a recommender , as one can don both roles .

But , since Kinetik is currently new on the marketplace, there are no “relevant” apps suggested since the growth of the user community on Kinetik will take time to pick up.But this is one social network to watch out for!