Find New iPhone Apps With the Pandora of App Discovery

Apple's App Store is huge, so to help you comb through the thousands of potentially awesome apps, be sure to try Crosswalk, the Pandora-like app finder that suggests new apps for you. Instead of looking at what apps you already have on your iOS device and then recommending ones like it (a la Pandora's Music Genome Project) it looks at your apps and your friends' apps and then makes suggestions. Of course, your friends have to be using Crosswalk, too.

Now your friends don't have to suggest or share things for you to discover, you can do it yourself. Ironically, Crosswalk is not an app, at least not yet, Cnet reporter Rafe Needleman wrote in a blog post.

It's a Web site for now, with an app launching once the Web site builds up a following and the developers can see how people are using it. Compared to the Popular Apps list in the App Store, Crosswalk can find more than just the super-huge popular apps that have been downloaded thousands and thousands of times. It's true crowdsourcing of app suggesting. The Web site is currently in beta, and the way it works is that it cross references your apps against your Crosswalk friends' apps and tells you what they are using (assuming you don't already have it). If one of your friends has an app you are thinking of downloading, you can pick their brain about it rather than relying on the App Store reviews.

Frenzapp, and Zwapp are two current apps that also help you find new apps by coordinating with your friends. Additionally, a Web site called Tapjoy recently launched that also wants to help you recommend good apps to your pals. Tapjoy is a virtual currency company, and they launched the Tapjoy Web site Nov. 3 for iPhone and Android users. Crosswalk is only for iPhone at this point, but the service seems particularly helpful, given that there are 550,000 apps in the App store.

Tell us in the comments if you like recommending new apps or if you prefer the hunt.