Simple Spark

Today, we’re happy to announce a major upgrade to Simple Spark which includes a lot of new features and a serious redesign.

Organize Your Apps into Sets

Easily drag and drop apps directly from the catalog into your new sets. Rearrange your apps as you see fit by simply dragging them around. Remove, reorganize and group your apps.

Easily Rate and Add apps with our new, efficient listing format

Each app in the catalog is easy to rate and add at the click of a button.

Browse over 8500 apps by Date, Category, Subcategory, Devices and Icons

Browsing the Catalog has become even easier, and the new icon view is a lot of fun.

A New Layout That Scales to the Size of Your Display

Have a large display? Go ahead and make that browser window larger, and the Simple Spark Catalog will scale itself to you.

Improved Search

Including the name translation you already love (flicker or flickr?), search has been tweaked to return even better results.

Want to Get Started?

Simply find the first app you want to add from the Simple Spark Catalog, hit add button, and you’re on your way.

Our Thanks

As always, your feedback is much appreciated. Drop us a line, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Our Technical Thanks

We’d like to extend our appreciation to the jQuery project and everyone who contributes to it. Without their efforts, our days would be much less fun and we enthusiastically recommend checking out it’s use for your web app needs.

Just a few months ago, we launched Simple Spark with 1000 web applications. Today, we’re proud to announce that the Simple Spark Catalog has surpassed 5000 fully searchable, summarized, and categorized web apps that are ready for discovery.

There’s some amazing work being done out there, so we though we’d celebrate by putting together a little video for the occasion. It’s a hypnotic and entrancing web fetish item we like to call 5000 Web Apps in 333 Seconds.

Look closely and you’re bound to see your favorites. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

Our thanks to everyone who submitted apps, reviews and feedback. We couldn’t do it without you.

Lastly, our thanks to artist Carl Leth for use of one of his great tracks.

Download the h.264 version for use in podcasts

View The Simple Spark Catalog
About Simple Spark

We’ve given our ad system a major upgrade and are now happy to introduce Cost Per Click (CPC) targeted inline advertising.

Ads are now delivered based on search, category, and other contexts so that when ads are viewed, they are at their most effective for the advertiser and most appropriate for the user.

Paying for Real Clicks Means Not Worrying About Theoretical Views

At Simple Spark, you only pay for clicks that go to your site, not views that may or may not have been seen. This allows you to no longer have to worry about how many views will actually result in clicks.

How do I get started?

Head over to the Advertising page for further details. You can use the Ad Campaign Calculator to contact us with your preferred category and quantity.

You can now browse back through the last four weeks of additions to the catalog with our new date browser at the bottom of the Simple Spark front page.

This gives you another way to dig and explore through the Simple Spark Catalog. Thanks again for all the support.

We’re currently tracking 4225 web apps. Did you catch them all as they came though? Me neither. Fortunately, we’ve added another great tool.

Introducing The Daily Update

Subscribe via email or feed reader and once a day you will get every single app that was added to the Simple Spark Catalog that day. The Daily Update will make sure you never miss another web app again.

How Do I Subscribe?

Just go to the Simple Spark front page and choose Email or Feed in “The Daily Update” box.

Thanks again for all your great feedback and feel free to drop us a line in the future.

One of the great things about web apps is their flexibility. Not only can you access web apps from any computer that has an internet connection, but if you’ve got mobile device (say, I dunno, an iPhone?) you can take your web apps with you. Talk about convenience. Many developers are taking advantage of the popularity of mobile devices and are customizing their apps to work even better on the move.

In order to address this trend we have added a device-specific section for the iPhone as well as for the Nintendo Wii. These sections include apps are either specifically (or have a alternate version) for each device. We also have a growing section of Mobile apps that covers all the other non-iPhone-specific mobile apps.

Developers! Is your app compatible with the iPhone?

If it is, be sure to add the location of your iPhone-specific interface to your app listing so that users are aware of your iPhone support. You can submit edits to any listing in the Simple Spark catalog by signing up for a free account.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback feel free to contact us.

As of today, we are officially accepting advertising on Simple Spark and we’d like to start things right with a note to our fantastic community.

To The Community

In our pursuit of paying our costs as well the rent from time to time, we would like to make the following promises to you, our community, right from the start.
1. Ads on Simple Spark will always be clearly marked as ads. Some sites try to trick you into clicking on an ad. We want you to click on an ad because it’s something that you’re actually interested it. It’s a better experience for you and a better deal for our advertisers.
2. Ads will never get in the way of your user experience here at Simple Spark. In fact, when done right, ads can help you find what you’re looking for. If you search for a certain type of app and someone is willing to spend a little ad money to get your attention, there’s a reasonable chance it might be worth looking at.
3. We will never ever accept advertising that’s obnoxious (or pops-up or pops-under or anything else of the sort). Our goal has always been to create something useful and we’re not about to injure our hard work in such a way.

If you should ever see any ads on Simple Spark that you feel don’t meet these goals, let us know.

How to Advertise on Simple Spark

If you would like to advertise on Simple Spark, everything you need to know is available on our
Advertise with Simple Spark page. Feel free to let us know if you have any questions.

We’re currently tracking 468 Social Networking apps, which is great, but sorting through them hasn’t been easy. Until now of course. Take a look.

And here’s what your options under Family and Kids looks like.

This should make a lot easier and much more fun to browse the aisles of the Simple Spark catalog.

Last week, we sent an email out to see if anyone would be interested in checking out Simple Spark. The reaction was extraordinary and we are unquestionably grateful.

Your overwhelmingly positive feedback fuels us to double our efforts and you can look forward to some seriously cool features in the weeks ahead.

Here’s just a brief selection of comments from Techcrunch, MSNBC, Profy, and many many more.

You can find many more at Technorati.

You also submitted a staggering number of apps and we’re now over 3500 of them.

A sincere thank you to everyone for the compliments. We look forward to working for you in the future.

Opinions, recommendations and suggestions. They’re now applicable to any apps listed in the Simple Spark catalog. Pimp your favorites, give them gold stars (just like in grade school) and generally get your talkiness going on any app listing.

3000+ Apps

We would be remiss to not mention that we surpasses 3000 sorted searchable apps this week. How cool is that? Our thanks to everyone who has jumped in and contributed.

And, of course, keep the feedback coming. We absolutely appreciate it.