App-search startup Xyo has just released Apps for Me, a feature that uses your and your friends’ Facebook data to surface new mobile apps and games that are relevant to your interests, as the Internet would say.
When you do an app search, Xyo not only finds apps that are, according to Facebook, going to to be awesome for you, specifically, and also apps that are likely to appeal to your friends. The feature displays which of your friends are most likely to be interested in apps ranging across 720 specific app and game interests.
The company indexes apps for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
"The case of people knowing what they look for happens in less than 5 percent of [app search] cases," said Xyo founder Matthäus Krzykowski in a chat about the new features.
"People don't know what to type to formulate their need. Most queries are queries like "free games," "new adventure games," or actually "taxi app san francisco" ... Even when people query specific title, say "Angry Birds," what they usually look for/install is games that are similar to Angry Birds -- Angry Birds is then just a metaphor for something else they are looking for."
So, he continued, the idea is to move away from a very literal keyword search model to a model based more on activity and intention -- think Google.com versus Google Now.
Xyo has been gathering information about what apps we search for since its launch back in 2010. The then-bootstrapped company collected, analyzed, and sold anonymized data on app searches, meaning it has now got a huge treasure-trove of information on what we want versus what we say we want when we start looking for new mobile apps to download.
After having tried out licensing and revenue sharing business models, Xyo will start offering paid search ad products later this year, Krzykowski said. "Our vision is not only to offer app marketing to the few cash-heavy app publishers as it is the status quo today, but offer it to people who want exposure in, for example, 'travel guides.'"
Last year, when it was still operating under the moniker Xyologic, the company released an Android search engine but has since refocused all its effort on the new Xyo and the new features.
"We've already had significant traction on the old Xyo," Krzykowski said, "but this is now about the early growth on this experience, early iterations to make it work very well for our users -- not just good but super good."
As for the future, "There are apps in the making," said Krzykowski. "A couple months from now you will see us launch some interesting developer tools no one has built before."
Image credit: brianwilkins/Flickr