Pandora's Tom Conrad: There should be a PageRank for mobile apps

People can’t stop talking about discoverability — how a mobile application can stand out in an app store against 10,000 or 100,000 competitors. Tom Conrad, chief technology officer at internet radio service Pandora, threw out a few novel ideas for improving the process today during a panel discussion at SDForum’s Business of New Media conference in Mountain View, Calif.

First, Conrad said he would like to see a “PageRank for applications.” While Google uses PageRank to deliver the most relevant web pages (theoretically) as search results, app stores should develop a similarly rich search experience.

For example, if you search for “Slanted Door, San Francisco” in Google, one of the top results is a link to the relevant restaurant profile on Yelp. Users should be able to perform a similar search in an app store and bring up the Yelp app, which would open up to Slanted Door when downloaded. Or when a user searches for “Beatles radio,” they should be able to see a link to the relevant station in the Pandora app.

Those capabilities are pretty far off, Conrad acknowledged, but there’s another model for better discoverability that could happen sooner. When it comes to app stores, he said, “We should stop thinking of them like the digital equivalent of Amazon.com and start thinking about them like YouTube.”

Apple’s iPhone App Store (where Pandora has been a huge success) has already made some moves in that direction, he said, because it’s such a dynamic marketplace, where different apps are featured every week. But Apple and its competitors haven’t added viral sharing mechanisms yet — they would make it easy for you to recommend apps to friends, and for friends to see which apps you’re downloading and using. (There are some specific tools that try to help with this, such as the Chorus app.)

Shameless plug: This topic is at the top of my mind because VentureBeat held its DiscoveryBeat 2009 event earlier this week, where a number of experts discussed these issues.

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