In two and a half weeks since its launch, micro-recommendation app Oink has clocked in a 100k downloads, with a symmetrical 100k items added and tagged. A product of Kevin Rose’s Milk Studios, Rose tells me that the app is now seeing a new Oink (rating) every four seconds and almost a million user sessions.
The app has also dropped the “Oink Builder” label and the invite only sign up system. And, while I was at first skeptical, it proved actually useful to me, as in I opened it up and scrolled through all my friends’ Oinks in order to determine where I would grab lunch with a friend yesterday (you can do this more precisely by opening the app, hitting “Discover” and sliding the top slider to a mile radius).
“We’re pretty happy,” Rose says about the promising usership numbers, “There are services out there that tell you Disneyland is awesome, but nothing tells you which fries are good. If we can win there and help people make purchasing decisions or decisions about what to do with their time, that’s huge.”
Rose tells me that Oink is still in the “exploring phase,” and he plans on eventually adding pro features like the ability to edit titles, vote on images, curate items as well as a way to allow the community to self regulate.
In terms of where Oink, which allows you to write short reviews of things via your phone, fits into the triumvirate of Yelp, Twitter and Foursquare, Rose says, “In the mobile space, a lot of these earlier apps that were created were built for web consumption, there’s a lot of awesome content on Yelp, but you have to sit there and run through 50 page reviews.”
Rose says that he sees Oink’s monetization potential in being an interface for businesses that want to interact with and attract loyal customers. “We’re in the “figuring out what sticks” mode …” he qualifies, “First we have to prove that there’s value in seeing a bunch of people help curate what the best stuff is in a given place.”
You can find Oink in the app store here. Below, a video of two grown men saying the word “Oink” a lot.
Update: A new Oink rating being added every four seconds.