MeFi Projects

I've spent the past 18 months or so slogging away at apprecs.com, an app search engine that can detect review manipulation. You can see the worst offenders here. I posted this back when this was iOS-only, and I'd like to share some major new features I've added. [more inside]
posted by hodgebodge on Oct 20, 2016 - 2 comments

While developing mobile apps, I realized how rife the App Store is with rating/review manipulation. So, I created apprecs.com, a facade for the store that allows you to filter out many of the fake, coerced, or otherwise manipulated reviews. You can also filter by other criteria such as how recently the app was last updated and age/gender of the typical user. What do you think? I'm getting started on adding Android (Google Play) support today. [more inside]
posted by hodgebodge on Apr 19, 2016 - 9 comments

Nametrix is an iOS app I created initially for baby naming, but it ended up being way cooler than that. It uses public data on millions of people (US census, US campaign contributions, Wikipedia) to determine what professions, political parties, and other affiliations each name tends toward. For example, Ellen is a disproportionately common name for 1) psychotherapists, 2) librarians, and 3) activists. Ellens also overwhelmingly lean toward the Democrat party and have tended to be most popular in the northeastern part of the US. As far as I know, nobody else has made anything remotely like this... Pretty fascinating stuff, right? What other kinds of metrics would you like to see?
posted by hodgebodge on Jan 24, 2013 - 23 comments