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Appsturbation

App-stur-ba-tion (noun) – The overabundance of applications that don’t fulfill any new, meaningful purpose.

Lately, I’ve seen several of the social media thought leadership embracing personal iPhone applications that turn out to be  nothing more than their own blogs.  While at first this seemed like a really cool idea to me (think: wow, I really should get that and recommend others do the same), the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how inane having such an application really is.

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Let’s face it — while many out there have very good advice and tips, why does it make sense for individual bloggers to have an iPhone app? What new features does such an app bring to the table that aren’t already present on the blog in question or its associated RSS feed?

Unless you’re a site that’s publishing many times a day, I see no valid reason for the implementation of such an app.  Even if you’re Techcrunch or Mashable, it’s probably better to just optimize your blog itself for the iPhone’s layout. After all, who really wants to download an application for every blog they are a frequent reader of? Viewing a site in Safari should serve just as well and keeps your iPhone from being cluttered or overburdened by excessive downloads.

(Image: textually.org)

2 Comments

  1. Steve Gerencser

    I love the new word, appsturbation.. I thought linkerbation was fun when Cali Lewis mentioned it in one of her videos, but I think appsturbation may be my new favorite word..

  2. Brian Wallace

    @Steve: thanks for dropping by – glad you like the new word.  With all the iPhone apps out there, I needed to come up with something that would describe my thoughts on the matter 🙂