Who Uses This?

March 13th, 2007

i use this is a Mac-focused community site for users of Mac software products. The premise is pretty simple, sort of like Digg crossed with MacUpdate. Users and developers add products to database, and if a particular user likes the product (or simply uses it), they click “i use this” and it bumps the use number for that item.

The interface is dead simple, but with some “Web 2.0” panache. The site serves as both a sort of popularity meter for applications, and as a means of looking for updated versions. It also allows users to add comments about the applications they use.

I was talking earlier today to Marcus, one of the site’s developers, and decided to give him some “pie in the sky” wishes for the site. A few short hours later, those wishes are realities! How exciting.

You can now subscribe to a feed for the latest users of a given app, and to the comments for any given app. This is a great tool for developers who want to pay attention to what’s going on with the apps on the site. Now when somebody “adds” one of my products I can get a little warm fuzzy as a space-bar through it in NNW. And when somebody posts a comment, I can read it and respond to it if appropriate.

For example, MarsEdit is listed on the site, and currently has 146 “users.” (Go on, crank that number up!). With Marcus’s new changes, I can now subscribe to user comments on MarsEdit by supplying NetNewsWire with a URL like this:

http://osx.iusethis.com/comment/app.rss/marsedit

To subscribe to comments for your (other) favorite app, just replace marsedit with the name that shows up at the end of your app’s iusethis URL.

To subscribe to all the users of MarsEdit, I subscribe using a similar URL:

http://osx.iusethis.com/app/users.rss/129

For this one, you can easily derive it from the users page for any app. Just add “.rss” to the users part of the URL!

I think these changes are pretty awesome, and totally geared towards making the site more useful to both users and developers. Nice work, Marcus!

Oh yeah, and while you’re in there, “use up” FlexTime, FastScripts, and Clarion, too.

This entry was posted to Links, Web. Comments are closed. Thanks for reading!

3 Responses to “Who Uses This?”

  1. Aaron Harnly Says:
    March 13th, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    That is fantastic — thanks to you both! (Feverishly checking the Letterbox feeds now…)

  2. Karsten Says:
    March 13th, 2007 at 4:34 pm

    Great stuff, thanks a lot!!

  3. Tom Harrington Says:
    March 14th, 2007 at 3:11 pm

    Now we just need to get the iusethis guys working with Sparkle+. They already generate Sparkle-compatible appcasts (best way to generate your Sparkle appcast? Post the app on iusethis. There is no step 2). There’s a MarsEdit appcast available at http://osx.iusethis.com/appcast/marsedit (and MondoMouse, of course, is http://osx.iusethis.com/appcast/mondomouse). It’d be amazing if they did something useful with Sparkle+ profile data.

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