Chomp, the iPhone app recommendation and discovery service that launched last month, is off to a good start. In its first 31 days, the company has gotten 150,000 users who have left a total of 1 million reviews. And today it’s launching Chomp Connect, a new feature that lets iPhone app developers integrate Chomp directly into their applications with a minimum amount of work.
Chomp invites users to leave reviews about the apps they’re using, and also features a ‘follow’ system where you can keep tabs on what your friends or Internet celebrities like Kevin Rose, who is on the service, are recommending. There’s also a recommendation feature that suggests more apps based on what you’ve liked in the past, similar to the way Netflix handles recommendations.
Until now users would leave their Chomp reviews in a standalone Chomp application (iTunes Link). WIth Chomp Connect, developers will be able to integrate Chomp’s review form into their apps with a few lines of code. You can see what one of these integrated forms look like in the shot above.
CEO Ben Keighran says that this is appealing to developers because it allows them to prompt users to leave an app review while they’re actually using and hopefully enjoying an application — iTunes only prompts users to review an app when they’re uninstalling it, which probably isn’t the most opportune time from the developer’s perspective. The catch is that Chomp reviews don’t get syndicated to iTunes, so only other users on Chomp get to see them. That said, the more Chomp reviews an app gets, the more exposure it is given to other Chomp members.
Aside from Chomp, there are many other services looking to improve on Apple’s iPhone app discovery process, including Appolicious, AppsFire, AppstoreHQ, Mplayit, and Chorus.
