iusethis: Digg for Mac Applications

Posted by Conner Downey on 05/27/07 in Linkage, Web

iusethis logo I bet many of you go to Digg or a site like it where readers vote on what content becomes popular. What if, instead of looking for new links, you wanted to find some new Mac apps? Then I suggest you check out iusethis. iusethis is a great site where small, relatively unknown shareware and freeware applications can become really popular. While you don’t need an account to browse the site, having an account allows you vote for applications, store the apps you use, and see which apps your friends like too. To show you how useful iusethis is, let’s do a quick search for “alarm“, and see what comes up.

As you can see, many apps are returned. Some more popular apps already have lots of votes like Awaken or Aurora, but even less known ones like Alarm Clock Pro and iRooster show up as well. I love finding new apps so this site has been a lot of fun for me. Even better, if you use Inquisitor, you can search iusethis by adding “http://osx.iusethis.com/search?q=%@” as a custom search engine.

Check it out at iusethis.com

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6 Comment(s)

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Jim said on

May 27th, 2007 at 12:00 pm

I truly hope you got payed to write this article. I mean really. iUseThis is such an obscure site that this is the first time I’ve seen it mentioned ANYWHERE outside their own domain. It’s used so little that 260 votes is obscenely high in the 2 to 10 vote norm.

I have no problem with the idea, or the people who run it. But this site is absolutely useless for finding small, relatively unknown apps because the only things listed are the more popular apps that can easily be seen at VT, MU, Softpedia and dozens of other sites.

I like this idea of users voting for the apps, rather than download count deciding what is popular (how many times have you downloaded an app and tossed it after one use).

Perhaps some kind of cross marketing or sponsorships with other popular sites can bring this site some much deserved publicity.

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Herkamer Roenski said on

May 27th, 2007 at 1:42 pm

I absolutely love iusethis. It works great, supports openid, and it’s gaining more and more users. The personalized RSS feeds work great for app updates. It’s really a wonder how Web 2.0 happens when there are people like Jim around….

Aaron Brethorst said on

May 29th, 2007 at 2:53 am

You know that Alarm Clock Pro and iRooster both predate Aurora and Awaken, right?

Cheers,
Aaron
author of iRooster

Conner Downey said on

May 29th, 2007 at 7:22 am

Yeah, but from the looks of it there, they seem less known. I knew about awaken and alarm clock pro, but found out about irooster and aurora later.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by.

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Teemoru said on

May 29th, 2007 at 4:53 pm

Iusethis is especially useful when doing a full reinstall. You can quickly download all the apps you were using. Iusethis Iusethis

Geoff said on

May 31st, 2007 at 10:30 am

iusethis.com is obscure? I don’t think so.

No, I’m not affiliated with them what-so-ever. But I’ve read about the site on many, many blogs and it has been referenced by many commercial sites as well.

iusethis is improving by leaps and bounds almost weekly.