Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Mac App Store Lacks Social Apps, Save for Twitter

Social apps are few and far between for the grand opening today of Apple’s Mac App Store, meant to be a desktop app marketplace equivalent to the highly successful app stores for Apple devices.

The only big-name social app joining the “social networking” category at launch is Twitter, which contributed an app that it says is designed for the “mainstream” user and is three times faster than the previous version of Tweetie for Mac, the independent app that Twitter acquired. The new Twitter app is quite elegant, with the rounded corners and UI accents of an iOS app rather than something from the desktop world. Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski says that based on his positive experience with it this morning he’s already deleted the two other Twitter clients on his desktop.

Other than that, the category contains an app for Mashable, the blog about social networking. There are some independent Twitter apps such as Tweetings for Twitter and Itsy. There’s an app for MarsEdit, the desktop blogging software.

That’s slim pickings compared to the social networking category for iPhone apps, where the top free apps are Skype, Facebook and Textfree. Meanwhile, the free iPad social networking app category is led by a couple of off-brand Facebook apps and the official Twitter app.

Facebook has neglected development of its own apps on the iPad and other platforms, so it’s not a surprise that the company hasn’t built something for the Mac app launch. And Skype, as you can understand, already has its own desktop app. Various texting and voice services perhaps make more sense in a phone situation. But you’d think there would at least be a LinkedIn, Tumblr or Myspace Mac app.

Maybe they’ll come later–today’s launch included just 1,000 apps. Or maybe the desktop just isn’t a very social place.

(Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I can link to the Mac apps themselves, as accessing the store requires a software update available only to users of the latest Mac operating system.)

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Nobody was excited about paying top dollar for a movie about WikiLeaks. A film about the origins of Pets.com would have done better.

— Gitesh Pandya of BoxOfficeGuru.com comments on the dreadful opening weekend box office numbers for “The Fifth Estate.”