I have a couple of questions about Apps and I am hoping that someone here has some experience that will help us phrase a grant proposal without sounding totally wack.
We have a new section of our website that is a Google Mashup - http://jwa.org/onthemap It occurs to us that the most natural pairing between a Google Mashup that asks people to "put Jewish women 'On the Map'" is to better enable that with an iPhone and/or Android, etc. App. There you are. You are at an historical location--maybe you see a plaque or a statue in front of you. Maybe it's the storefront where a house or auditorium or something else once stood. You pull out your iPhone to take a picture and show your friends. Maybe it would also be fun to share it with the world. We think it could be. 1. I know that there are apps for sending pictures from an iPhone to Facebook or to Flickr. I also know that lots of people use their phones to email pix to themselves, and then upload to those locations from email back at their computers (or by launching email on the mobile device and then uploading?). Is anyone using such a direct-uploading app that is compelling? Is there an open source version on which we could work to develop a Drupal API so that people could upload to our website? 2. What are reasonable evaluation criteria? Based on how many people use our Facebook App (granted, it isn't particularly exciting in its current iteration), I find it hard to believe that as many as 600 people would download this. Does that sound like a lot for a specialized application? Too little? Is it fair to assume that people downloading the app would use it at least once? More than once (assuming that we have written something that fits the environment and is usable)? We can make guesses about how much the existence of the App would be retweeted and blogged about, but are there other evaluation criteria that would help us understand if this was/wasn't "successful"? 3. I'm thinking that we may want to include a way to survey participants/app downloaders. Can we reach people once they have downloaded our app? Do we get any info about them (other than what is passed to our site when someone uploads an image) from the Apps store or whatever? What can we do to remind people that they have the app, hoping to encourage ongoing use even as people download new apps and life moves on? How hard might it be to include a "most recently uploaded" RSS feed as part of the app? Obviously I'll be showing up at MCN in the fall with loads of questions! If any of ya'll who have gotten here way ahead of us have reportable experience, I'll be glad to hear of it now. Many thanks, Ari
