Musings from The Software Underground

There's a cool new Mac site in town, and its name, is i use this.

From the About information on their site:

iusethis.com is a new way for you to organize your applications as well as discover new ones. You can also use it to check if your apps are up-to-date.

We believe that iusethis.com uses a much more democratic way to rate apps, by counting the number of users you can define the value of an app to a much higher degree then using ratings.

It's pretty good idea, and I recommend checking it out (and saying that you use our products if you do).

I realize it's early in the life of the site, but a few things could make it a lot better.

The first thing would be having a way to add a link on your product page that allows users to say they use the app right from your product information. That'd be good for us, and good for them, as a cross-marketing-kind-of-thing.

The second thing would be more flexible browsing of tags. While the current way of displayed tags is neat,

the 75 most popular keywords on iusethis, grouped in 5 different sizes by popularity, and sorted alphabetically.

it's not really that useful for apps that aren't tagged with the most popular tags. There needs to be a browse that is wide open in addition to what's there now. I also noticed that if you click on a tag, that currently, only the top 10 applications are shown. I can of course understand the ranking, that makes sense, but why can't I go beyond that, to tag the apps that I use that might be in the 11-20 block or the 21-30 block of apps. A site like this really needs to be infinitely browsable, and explorable in many different ways.

The last thing that would be a nice change would be the addition of direct links to the products. For instance to link to MacGourmet and SQLGrinder, I can only seem to use a link to the search results.

Still, it's a great new "Web 2.0" take on sites like MacUpdate and VersionTracker, and it will be interesting to see how it develops.