Gaming the Apple Lists – Fast track to fame!

I just had a good laugh at Tech Crunch’s article Want To Top Apple’s All-Time Top Paid Apps List? Sell A Ton Of Apps — Or Do This.

I make the most of the appshopper.com lists of new, popular and free apps and have had a couple of “wins” where an app I’ve put on my wish list is free for a limited time. I figured they were going for the word-of-mouth promotion and given how many kids we know who have access to an iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad the word does get out and I get presented with the app store all ready to download some new (invariably ghastly iMobster type thing) app to install once I put in my much protected password.

Getting anywhere on the list of the paid apps is fantastic for the app developers and I’d never questioned how those lists were constucted. I’d figured Apple knew how much money was changing hands and basing it on that – makes sense right?

If, however, they are counting downloads alone then the system is hugely flawed. Go free for a day, week or even month and a half way decent app will be installed a huge number of times – if only because it won’t be free later and it might just be worth it.

I don’t have a vested interest in Apple getting it right, but now that the secret is out it’ll be worth keeping an eye on appshopper, free app of the day etc to see

• Who is desperate to get up the ranks
• What you can “score” for free that you might otherwise have paid for!

Westfield kick their shoppers in the guts!

The weather is gloomy so my boy has taken advantage of it and cajoled me into taking him with some friends to Yogi Bear. We bought our tickets online and parked in a reasonably inconvenient area because I didn’t want to waste time looking for a park and its no bother to walk. 

I was astounded to see that Wilsons parking have been given a contract to enforce parking restrictions. Where I was parked is limited to 90 minutes (less than a movie) and closer parks got a generous 240 minutes.

If you want longer you have to plead your case to Customer Services at their newly relocated desk. The woman I talked to gave me a flyer and a complaint form and told me that extensions would be given if you could show you had made significant purchases.

I have a young daughter who wants to go to the mall with her friends and objects that I feel I should be there too. Given the unreasonable parking situation and the $3/ hour internet at Starbucks it looks likely she’ll get her independence more quickly than I’d planned.

Facebook Profiles – cute while they last

I was impressed by Mashable’s article on customising facebook profiles and used the Schweppes tool to customise mine. I wasn’t hugely committed to it, didn’t have a great photo to use but thought it would be fun for a while.

I got it set up using Firefox and it looked lovely until I decided to show my sister in law and she uses IE. The images were all out of line and I looked like I’d had a severe stroke or palsy. Since then one of my lovely nieces has started tagging the Xmas family photos – and I appear in some.

Unless I stop facebook doing what it does maintaining my profile will be a full time job. However one of the things I liked about facebook was the uniformity. The content and character of the user stands out on page because the garishness that consumed MySpace is gone. With that in mind, perhaps its 1 point facebook, nil to the modifiers.

A daily post – do able?

Gawd, don’t even know if anyone would want to hear my daily whine, oops, sorry blog. I don’t even update facebook that often!

Check out http://dailypost.wordpress.com/ for details of their challenge. I doubt there is any reward other than filling the net with more drivel but it may be interesting!

2011 starts for me in 5 and a half hours. So – lets get this moving!