I’m announcing another API-related project from our users today, this time from @shifted1reality - a Pinch Media Google gadget. If you’re using iGoogle for your personalized homepage, you can now get your Pinch Media stats there.
For more interesting things you could do with our API, see our previous post.
When we launched our developer API, we were hoping developers would use it to fill in gaps in our product offering - and you have! The first of a few interesting projects (that we know of - but we also like surprises) has launched: the Pinch Media Watcher, a native iPhone SDK application for viewing your application’s stats. Thanks to Graham Abbott, the developer, who built and released the application.
There’s still a ton of other projects we’d love to see built with our API. Just off the top of our heads, this includes:
If you’re working on one of these, or any other project involving our API, let us know — we’d love to help you promote it.
Everyone at Pinch Media was thrilled to see the comScore research on iPhone applications today, written up in some detail over at VentureBeat. comScore has a panel that shares with them everything they do online - we don’t know for sure, but we suspect the client comScore’s panel members are using to measure activity on online webpages now also peeks into the Mobile Applications folder of their iTunes library. If the panel is broad and representative enough, then you can draw conclusions about the market as a whole.
Pinch Media collects a different subset of data - we only know about the applications that use Pinch Analytics, and we don’t know anything about individual users, but we’ve got the complete picture when it comes to application runs, unique users, usage times, and so on - no panel here. And although we’re not inclined to talk about our specific clients, they do include a few applications mentioned in comScore’s press release.
This is awesome, because comScore’s data combined with our data lets us draw some conclusions we’ve never been able to draw before.
First, we can confirm that comScore’s data is pretty solid. For the most part, the ratios are right - applications higher on their list have more users than applications lower on their list, and in the correct proportions. (So an application with double the percentage reach actually does have about double the lifetime unique users.) Note that US application usage isn’t the same thing as world application usage - some of the applications on comScore list have stronger usage than others in other countries.
Next, we can combine comScore’s numbers with our own numbers to figure out the entire size of the application-using market. This is simple math - if we know an application with X% reach has Y users, how many users would an application with 100% reach have? Our best estimate, based on the data we’ve got combined with comScore’s reach percentages - the total number of devices running applications is between 22 and 23 million. This does assume that comScore’s US panel is representative of application users worldwide, but it’s a better estimate than any we’ve had in the past.
Finally, we can combine the 22-23MM figure with Apple’s recent announcement that more than 30MM iPhones and iPod Touches have been sold to get the estimate in the title of this blog post - about three-quarters of iPhone / iPod Touch owners have downloaded applications from the AppStore. That’s a higher percentage than we figured, and speaks to both the quality and variety of the applications available on the AppStore and the relative ease of downloading apps.
Developers interested in joining over 1,000 live iPhone applications and tracking their own application usage can sign up for our free Pinch Analytics product here.
Like most startups, the team at Pinch Media is always trying to come up with ways to do more with less. We’ve got a list of product features the length of my arm, and at any one time we can work on about a fingertip’s worth. We want to do everything - especially the many requests that come from the thousands of developers in our network - but at the end of the day, we’ve got to ruthlessly prioritize.
At the same time, we look at startups like Twitter and marvel at the sheer amount of infrastructure surrounding them. I come across a new client, a new mashup, or a new tool that leverages their platform almost every day. And none of those tools were built by Twitter themselves. I’d argue that Twitter’s API contributes more to their success than their website.
You can tell where this is going - we’ve got a lot of great developers using our product and we simply can’t do everything for everybody ourselves, so today we’re releasing a full REST-based API to our entire developer base, so you can build whatever you like with it. (Here’s the overall documentation, along with the docs for our Application Service and Analytics Service.) We’ve been using this API internally for a while - for example, our iPhone-optimized site, which lives at iphone.pinchmedia.com, is built with it.
With our API, you could:
I’m sure there’s a thousand other things I’m not thinking of - which is entirely the point of an API. If you build something awesome that others could use, let us know, and we’ll feature it. Happy coding!
I love my iPhone’s ubiquitous Internet connection and user-friendly browser. If I want or need to look something up online, I can do so immediately — I can barely remember what life was like prior to having one. Of course, now I want every site out there to have an iPhone-optimized version. It’s bothered everyone at Pinch Media that accessing our stats from the iPhone itself involved a lot of zooming and squinting — so we’re thrilled to roll out the new, iPhone-optimized version of the Pinch Media developer portal. Just point your iPhone to iphone.pinchmedia.com to access your applications’ reporting — no zooming required.
Like many things here at Pinch Media, our iPhone-optimized site is a work in progress — if you run into any issues, or have any feedback, please let us know.
UPDATE: We’ve added some screenshots, below.
