Because of its success, North East developer Alex Reid has created Next Metro for Android, and it’s now available on the Android Market!

Alex has spent a lot of time building and testing the app to work across the various types of Android OS and handset, so now Android users will never miss the last Metro home.

The app is available for the special introductory price of just 99p. Download it today!

We’ve deliberately kept quiet about what Appysnap is and what it does, because it primarily involves photos and gamification – two white-hot spaces in apps right now. Paranoid? Possibly, but a similar app launched the week before last at SXSW, which goes to prove the point.

What is Appysnap?

Appysnap is a photo-based game that can be played anywhere; players are sent missions at any time of day, to take a photo of a specific item, place or theme before their time runs out – if they successfully complete the mission quick enough, players receive points, prizes and other incentives.

(if you’d like to see how the app looks, head over to Appysnap’s Facebook page where we’ll be adding screenshots over the next few days)

Some missions will play out in secret (players won’t receive notifications that a new mission has arrived) and in time we’ll be adding localised missions which can be as granular as we like – regional, local, even specific neighbourhoods. A great example would be an event or gig, where we release a mission in a venue for the crowd to complete, with the prize for the winner being VIP access backstage immediately afterwards. A virtual game with real-time rewards.

That’s it – a really simple concept but one that’s required a lot of work to realise, primarily because there isn’t another app like Appysnap. There have been plenty of challenges (you can probably guess the most obvious we’ve had to deal with), but we’ve managed to overcome them with a dash of ingenuity, a dose of common sense, but mostly through swearing at Macs.

More to come

Version 1.0 is very straight forward, the best we could deliver in a bootstrapping scenario in the shortest period of time. We’ve plans to add deeper social integration and gameplay for teams (multiple photo missions across continents, anyone?). For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be waiting on Apple to approve the app.

We’ve had the app in testing with a handful of users, and we plan to do more in the short-term, but no amount of testing is a substitute for people playing Appysnap for real. We’ll adapt and build on the feedback users offer once the app is approved and in the App Store.

Finally, a couple of thank yous – first to Graham Morley for helping us define the initial UX flow of the app, and to Torunn Seim Skrogstad for delivering the design of not only the app, but our web activity, some of which will go live on our website in the next few days.

Paul and Jon

(If you haven’t heard of AppySnap yet, there’s a Twitter account and a Facebook page, too – we’d love you to join us!)

In the meantime, we’d like to tell you about the people we’re working with. Aside from myself and Jon, we’re delighted to be utilising the skills of two great talents to help us nail the look and feel of the app.

The first is Graham Morley, who was the UX engineer on Graphic.ly, a multi-million dollar start-up initially based in North East England. Aside from being an excellent sounding board and all-round top geezer, Graham has extensive experience of UX and UI for mobile devices. Perfect.

We’re hoping AppySnap will not only offer a distinctive user experience, but also samurai-sharp style, so Torunn S Skrogstad will be looking after the design of the app’s gameplay elements. Torunn’s another positive force to have on side, and together with Graham we think we can create something you’ll have fun with and want to tell others about.

Expect to see the AppySnap website launch in mid-January, while the app itself will be available for download from the beginning of February. P

In the meantime, we’ve continued our reworking of our iPhone travel guide apps; following the release of Instant Boston, this weekend we’ve relaunched Instant New York as well as Instant New York Lite.

Our Instant New York iPhone travel guide app has plenty of new content; as well as new entries we’ve updated the pricing and tips, and all the subway information after NYC reshuffled their routes earlier in the year. There’s also the standard features you’d expect – A to Z search, geo-location features and embedded Google Maps, and the highly popular image search.

Meanwhile, Instant New York Lite is a free version of the app – all the functionality is here, but with less content and the app is ad-supported. We wanted to provide a free app to provide a taste of what our Instant Cities apps are about, but also experiment in the free app space.

Hope you like it. P

But it goes deeper than that. Facebook has worked with Foursquare and Gowalla to fully integrate their services; it allows badges and check-ins to be imported – not only from Foursquare and Gowalla, but MyTown and Yelp too. The smaller services are exposed to hundreds of millions of users while Facebook becomes a GLS aggregator overnight.

Whether these services should be worried all depends on the space Facebook moves forward into. Foursquare, Gowalla and MyTown rely on a strong gaming element to gain traction. Foursquare helps local businesses and national brands generate and deepen consumer loyalty. Yelp is about peer recommendation. Facebook could move into any one of these spaces without blinking.

But perhaps there are bigger fish to fry – namely Craigslist. In fifteen years, nobody has challenged the site’s supremacy in the area of classifieds. That’s not to say there aren’t start-ups that consider themselves contenders, but none have come close to the site’s (rumoured) nine-figure annual turnover or its ubiquitous association with online classifieds.

Since 1995, Craigslist has been instrumental in migrating a cash-rich revenue stream from newspapers to the internet. But Craigslist hasn’t moved on since. The most obvious evolution of classifieds (to me, at least) is the migration to mobile, to GLS. Craigslist has had over two years to play with the iPhone, yet has no mobile presence other than a third-party app that mimics the navigation of the site, instead of playing to the strengths of the device. The iPad version is even worse – all that on-screen real estate, and it’s still menu-driven. Craigslist’s own efforts are non-existent – despite their millions of dollars, their site isn’t optimised for mobile browsers.

I think Craigslist, in a continued attempt to keep things simple, has dropped the ball. The mobile web – through web and native mobile apps, and optimised websites too – will revolutionise business in the next five years, just as the internet did 15 years ago. Ignoring trends in design is one thing; ignoring consumer-driven technology is quite another. Craigslist are risking their future.

Of course, this is just my thinking, but it’s thinking I share with Jon and others, too. Which is why since January, we’ve been developing a mobile classified platform called TinToTin (a name conjured up by myself and Di Gates). The premise is really simple; GLS means you no longer need to establish geographical hubs on a website, and there’s no need for text-driven navigation when you can see what’s around you, wherever you are.

TinToTin allows local shops, bars and restaurants to post offers and vouchers for fixed periods, businesses to advertise their services, clubs and venues to promote events, individuals to buy and sell bric-a-brac, companies to advertise jobs, property and so on. We describe TinToTin as looking in the local newspaper shop window to see what’s happening around you, somewhere you can place a postcard or read those already there. TinToTin’s initial strapline was “Shop, Sell, Share – everywhere.” The ability to use it is as simple as that postcard; one page to fill in to post your classified. That’s it.

But it’s more than that. TinToTin is a GLS aggregator – even if there’s no traction in a particular neighbourhood, the platform still has value in allowing users to check into Foursquare, see upcoming events and so on. Here are a couple of mock-ups to show you how that might look:

Hoping for a speedy launch to take first-mover advantage, we applied to Northern Film & Media’s iPad fund, but were rejected because TinToTin’s functionality could be replicated on an iPhone (an ignorant excuse since all apps can share functionality between the two devices but provide very different user experiences – Gowalla is a prime example). We’ve followed other lines of private funding since, without success, so we’ve bootstrapped to this point. And it’s not like there’s isn’t interest; we’ve been in discussions with a major mobile service provider about actively promoting this single app to their entire market (not a UK provider, but a European market similar in size to O2).

The question is, do we continue bootstrapping and putting several more months of our time and effort into TinToTin? Because when I look at Facebook Places, I see an impending marriage with Facebook Marketplace and a serious threat to Craigslist.

Don’t look at Facebook Places as simply being about checking-in; it’s about the broader ability to post geo-tagged content to hundreds of friends, that may also be relevant to tens of thousands of users in your immediate vicinity. A simple Marketplace button on the mobile app (and the site) that maps all listings local to the user – or allows the user to add simple, geo-tagged listings with photos – would enjoy massive take-up and become an essential service in no time. Why would you ever look at Craigslist again?