Apptizr finds best App Store apps for you (500 invites)

As an iPod Touch owner, my personal favorite pastime is the App Store. Finding new apps, debating which of the hundreds of alarm clocks is the best one, and fighting excitement when I get an update for one of my apps is just too much fun to pass on.

But now that there are more than 100,000 apps in the store, weeding through them all to find the ones I actually want is becoming a full-time job. You can find reviews of iPhone apps everywhere — some in videos, some in podcasts, and even apps on sale — but it’s hard to find reviews and recommendations meant only for you. Luckily, Apptizr has come along. It’s destined to be for iPhone apps what Pandora is to music – recommendations based on what you like, and most importantly on what you hate.

Signing up for Apptizr is easy and only takes a few minutes. After a briefly existential moment when Apptizr asked me what words described me, and then gave options like “Pet Lover,” “Baby,” and “Road Warrier,” I got it set up to give me recommendations with only a little personal information – gender, age, and some interest-based questions.

The first thing I loved about Apptizr is that it filters apps for you based on what device you use. If you’ve got an old iPhone, or an iPod Touch, some of the apps just don’t matter to you. Apptizr smartly asks about that at the beginning and gets rid of everything you don’t care about.

Once it knows who you are, it recommends lots of apps from a whole variety of realms, each with a description, reviews pulled from the iTunes store, and a link to go get the app. If you like the app, or hate it, or already own it, one click makes the recommendations even better. You’ll see, 10 recommendations at a time.

If you thumbs-down an app (fart apps, goodbye), it leaves the list. Thumb one up, and it gets added to your “My Apps” section, where you can go to download apps and remember what you liked.

There’s also an “All Apps” menu, that lets you browse all the apps available in the store – it’s no different than the iTunes store, but it’s easier and faster to navigate than the sometimes clunky iTunes.

Personally, I went through and clicked “Already Own It” for nearly the entire first page of recommendations (pretty impressive that it had me pegged so well). Then I added about 25 new ones in the span of an hour. My wallet hates Apptizr, but my iPod Touch loves it.

I really wish I could give Apptizr my iTunes login information and have it figure out what I already own, what I’ve rated, and all the information I’ve already put into the App Store, but alas, no such luck. Pretty quickly, though, I managed to get Apptizr to figure out what I had and what I didn’t, and the reviews got good in a hurry. There’s a Genius feature on the iPhone itself that gives recommendations for the App Store, but most of those did nothing for me and weren’t nearly as good as the ones Apptizr gave once it got to know me.

Apptizr is still invite-only, but it’s offering 500 invites for VentureBeat readers. You can sign up for Apptizr at this link. When prompted, enter the code ‘4VentureBt’ without the quotes.

Apptizr is a brand-new company, based in Mountain View, Calif., and was co-founded in 2009 by two former employees of Danger, PayPal, eBay, and Oodle. Apptizr hasn’t received any funding thus far and plans to look for investors next year.

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