App recommendation service gets more friendly.
Apps recommendation service Appsfire is now generating 1.5 million click-throughs a month to app ages on Apple's App Store, says co-founder Ouriel Ohayon.
Those clicks are coming from users who have browsed an app's details on the Appsfire site, and clicked through to the store. Ohayon says this activity has increased sixfold in the last four months.
Meanwhile, the company's AppStream app for iPad has been downloaded more than 250,000 times, and is totalling more than 80,000 daily sessions.
"Appsfire is becoming de facto a major destination for app discovery," says Ohayon.
The news comes as Appsfire adds Facebook Connect into its core service, allowing users to sign in and see what apps their Facebook friends have been downloading.
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"We believe that apps are not important enough to users to be willing to rebuild a new social graph around it," says Ohayon.
"This is why this step is so critical: people only care about apps from people they know. We also believe most people have no idea what to search in the app store and prefer to be guided through social passive discovery. Which is what social discovery is all about."
Other social networks will be added in future, along with features to notify users when one of their friends signs up for Appsfire.
Alongside this, Appsfire is launching a new chart of the apps that are being most liked, commented on and shared on Facebook itself.
The sentiment-based AppTrends for Facebook rankings are published online, and join an existing AppTrends for Twitter chart run along similar lines.
Ohayon says Appsfire plans to eventually unify the two charts to create "a unified pulse on how the web feels about apps".
Since Appsfire has been monitoring Facebook, it has tracked 40,000 apps being discussed and shared on the social network.
