applause
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Applause for Google Hangouts lets you give live broadcasts a thumbs up
Google+ Hangouts On Air lets you ask your favorite broadcasters questions, but what if you want to give them feedback without littering the Q&A feed with snarky, off-topic judgments? Well, now you can. Google just updated its live broadcasting service with Applause: a simple feature that allows viewers to give live streams a thumbs up or thumbs down in real time. Feedback is instantly charted below the video, offering broadcasters and viewers alike an at-a-glance view of how the stream is performing. That's all there is to it -- check out Google's short announcement at the source link below.
Analytics firm Applause launches the Applause Index
I'm not sure how useful this idea is, but it is interesting, and we'll see how it all plays out. Applause is an analytics firm that purports to measure app quality and user satisfaction, by scanning the App Store for rankings, sales and reviews (there are a few other companies that do this already, like App Annie and Distimo). But Applause's innovation is that it boils an app's performance down into one 0-100 number, called the Applause Score. From all of the information available for that app, Applause ranks it into one number, which you can then (supposedly) use to compare app quality and popularity. And Applause has used these numbers to launch the Applause Index, which tracks the scores of 60 high-profile apps, combining them into one number that Applause claims will let you see "peaks and valleys in the overall apps economy." In other words, Applause has tried to boil the day-to-day popularity of both the Android and iOS marketplaces into one number, similar to the way the Dow Jones Industrial Average works in the stock market. Is it useful? We'll have to see -- it's possible that, over time, this number could show trends in the app stores, or even reflect actual consumer attitudes. But that will probably take some practice and research -- at this point, Applause has only begun to track these defined "scores," so there are undoubtedly some quirks in the system (and it's not clear to me how these 60 apps were chosen to represent the Index, even after browsing through the footnotes). But it is an interesting idea, and who knows? Over time, this number could show us something about the App Store we didn't see before.
WoW Insider's top ten stories of all-time
Today, December 6, is the third anniversary of our little site. We actually started posting a few weeks beforehand, to get up and running, but the official launch was over on our parent Joystiq on December 6th, 2005. Since then, we've posted over 12,000 posts, commenters have commented over half a million times, and people have visited the site over two hundred million times (millions more if you count all the RSS readers out there). Oh, and we've covered nine classes, 27 builds, nine major content patches (and hundreds if not thousands of class and content changes), and absorbed the angry yells, QQ tears, cheerful applause and apathetic mehs of all of you hundred of thousands of readers. What a ride it's been.And so, to look back at our little piece of history today, we figured we'd check back over the records (all the records we have), and come up with a top ten list of our most popular stories of all time. Keep in mind that this is a list of our most popular stories -- while it does include our most popular posts of all time, we had to make a few tweaks and filters to make it all make sense (our most popular page of all time, other than the front page, surprise, is actually page 2). But this will offer you a good look at just what WoW Insider is all about -- from our great looks at some of the biggest stories in Warcraft, to an interesting view of just what you, our readers are really interested in.Thanks for the memories -- the site has only gotten bigger almost every single month during the past three years, and that's because readers like you come and visit to see what we're posting. Click the first link below to see story number 10, and follow the links all the way up to number one.Number 10: Blizzard takes a stand on erotic RP...
