Fierce Competition

A recent Business Week story talks about how some companies are hiring marketing companies to promote their iPhone apps. They also mention another company that "appears to have solicited positive reviews through an ad on Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online tool that farms out small tasks." The article goes on to talk about some of the limitations of the App Store in handling reviews, compared to other review sites.

The thing that caught my attention, was this line, "Some developers ask family and friends to post positive reviews. Others post negative reviews of competitors' applications." I've seen this negativity in a number of different places, with people slamming products without having used them. On the App Store, you have to purchase/download an app to review it, which is supposed to prevent this kind of thing. But, anyone can download a free app and post a negative review. My thought is, why spend the time or money to bash someone else, why not just make your stuff better? (OK, I recognize the the financial reward for bashing a competitor might be substantial, but show some character please.)

Before I started using mobclix, I can across this article. I read through it and went on to read the comments, where some people were bashing mobclix. The author of the article goes back and forth with some people posting negative comments. At one point the author says, "It is not vaporware. Do you work for one of mobclix's competitors? See update." It starts to get really bad when they question the author's journalistic integrity and professionalism. It's pretty clear that the competition is waging a major flame war.

The bottom line is, "who says it" and "why they say it" is just as important as "what they say." Unfortunately, most of the time we only get "what they say." (Don't necessarily take reviews and comments at face value.)

On a more positive note: Egg! seems to be getting a lot of new users, since it's release on Sept 3rd.