thushan

Interesting bit of geekery you found. I was mucking in there my self to see how they did it. Seems like they swing through a bunch of images to make that effect: http://images.apple.com/itunes/10-billion-app-countdown/imag...

Great points that you've made. One thing though, I would argue that we've seen this issue in action: "Nahhhhh... this is like saying "We have too many car manufacturers... we all need to narrow down and settle on a couple key models"

That is essentially what the reborn GM has done - it paired down a wide range of models by their brands into just a handful. If the recovery of the company is any indication, consumers responded well to a whittled down set of choices over fragmentation set.

I did a double take myself.

Shouldn't the sites hosting deliberately manufacturing links also fall to the algorithm's reputation/inbound link values as well. We all know they don't, and that seems like that is one of the fundamental issues here. As much as I'd like to have a site black list, that doesn't really help the major issue at hand.

Anyone have any ideas why the clone sites like efreedom are ranking above Stack Overflow when SO's inbound links and reputation values are likely far better than efreedom's in Google's algorithm? I'm surprised that search engine optimization could do THAT much to a site's ranking. Also it's not like SO isn't doing the same kind of SEO themselves.

What I'm trying to get at is, with all things equal, let's say Stack Overflow and efreedom's SEO is on par with each other, shouldn't SO's reputation/inbound link ranks automatically trump things?

Seeing the crapware cell phone service providers are putting (that can't be removed no less) on their Android devices, thinking of the future outlined in this TC piece makes me wonder how much worse it could get. And we thought the fragmentation of Android was something of concern already...

I think it would be in Google's interest to start some sort of certification program/or requirement that ensures that any device with their logo on it also can run a user installed vanilla straight-from-Google version of Android without the gunk.

Might want to check this web app that's doing roughly the same thing: http://www.mercuryapp.com/

Thanks for that info.

I don't know if they are a startup or an offshoot of someone else's already existing technology, but the group behind WorldLens (QuestVisual) have my votes. Yes maybe I'm saying that in light of this week's release being on my mind, but I think they have some wicked cool technology. Shockingly wicked if I say so myself. Hipmunk would be my vote for second.

Agreed. Also, the screenshot on your homepage doesn't tell me much about your app (and the screen is out of date).

Granted most of the users that would find this app useful are power users, the teaser text on the site is probably more technical than it should be. Sentences like "There's no need to get out of your current context to check out a random link - just queue it to visit after you finish your current article" come to mind when I say that.

If you're interested I'd be more than happy to send you a couple other copyedit/text edits to that landing page. Just email me.

Doesn't Douglas Adams touch on that? Wasn't Earth a big computer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galacy?

From a wikipedia entry... "[The computer] Deep Thought does not know the ultimate question to Life, the Universe and Everything, but offers to design an even more powerful computer, Earth, to calculate it. After ten million years of calculation, the Earth is destroyed by Vogons five minutes before the computation is complete."

Has anyone had their app get rejected for using SSL merely for authentication? What did you do to fix it? Remove SSL and resubmit, or wait it out through the government review process?

Thanks for that info. That's a great start for what I'm looking for.

Does anyone know of any other solutions for this kind of data other than ITA? Are there any open/cheap APIs for getting at scheduling/price data? I hear Hipmunk is using Orbitz currently to power their results (or so someone said on that recent TechCrunch article in the comments). Does Orbitz have some API? Would be a fun data set to play with if one is openly available, though I love what Hipmunk is already doing.