Pixable, a photo viewing aggregation service, has won praise for the smart way it organizes photos and orders them by relevancy for users. Now, we’re seeing that users are catching on in a big way and have turned the iOS mobile app into a daily addiction.

The New York City company told me it recently eclipsed the 1 million download mark on iOS, with almost of all of the downloads happening in the last few months of last year. But while noteworthy, that’s something that a lot of apps are able to pull off. What’s really interesting to me is how sticky Pixable has become for users, who are engaging continuously at a pretty impressive rate.

Pixable says that its users are viewing 100 million photos a month and opening the app on average 11 times per month. Some 60 percent of those users are still active on the app since it launched in April while 60 percent of users also use the app on consecutive days.

The Pixable app primarily aggregates Facebook and Twitter pictures, with fuller support for Facebook right now. It organizes photos into various categories such as top of the day, week or month, new profile pics, most recent photos. Pixable also aggregates Instagram, Flickr, yFrog, Twitpic photos and YouTube and Vimeo videos within a user’s Twitter feeds.

Where Pixable shines is in how it uses machine learning and algorithms to process more than 70 signals, helping it to surface the most relevant pictures for users. It will try to measure the affinity between users and the strength of their relationships, taking into account things like common schools, or cities and how much they interact. It will also look at “likes” and comments to determine if it’s a picture that a user wouldn’t want to miss.

Inaki Berenguer, Pixable’s CEO and Co-Founder, said photos have changed from being a way for people to hold on to memories into a form of communication. It’s almost like email now, he said, with Pixable setting itself up as a smart mobile inbox for photos.

“Photos are about telling friends what you’re up to you or you see something funny or eat something and you take a picture. People are broadcasting all the time, but there’s too much noise. Pixable organizes all these photos and brings order to them and sense to chaos,” Berenguer told me.

Pixable, which raised .6 million in November, said it’s also introducing hashtags into the service, so users can tag photos to organize them for later viewing or they can use them like hashtags on Twitter, adding a layer of metadata to a picture. It has also added a mobile web version of the service.

In my earlier profile on Pixable, I wrote how I liked Pixable’s approach, helping people see the photos that matter to them. As we live more of our lives online and through social networks, we need ways to prioritize all this content and filter out a lot of the noise. Pixable still has more to do to more fully integrate pictures beyond Facebook and Twitter, but I like its initial start and so do its users.

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We had mobile apps before the iPhone, but the modern mobile app market really began with the App Store in 2008. Three years later, we’re swimming in apps and poised to hit a big milestone: 1 million apps available to users.

Mobilewalla, a mobile analytics firm, said iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 have collectively hit 991,524 apps available in their stores, with the big milestone set to be reached sometime next week. This is not a complete list, and leaves out Symbian apps and older Windows Mobile and Palm software. But it’s still a reminder of just how big this modern market is and how much it’s grown in just a few years. Developers have already built more than 1 million apps on iOS and Android alone, but a good chunk of apps have been pulled over time.

Apple continues to lead the pack with 59.6 percent of the market, with 591,428 apps and Android follows with 321,020 apps or 32.3 percent of the market, according to Mobilewalla. BlackBerry has 43,544 apps, good for 4.4 percent of the total, while Windows Phone 7 had 35,248 apps or 3.5 percent. Apple’s developers are adding about 1,000 new apps a day while Android developers are uploading about 1,400 a day, said Mobilewalla’s founder and executive chairman Anindya Datta.

He said the market for apps has doubled this year, which started out with 484,000 apps. There are 150,000 app developers and companies responsible for the apps on the market now, according to Datta. The top app categories across all platforms are Entertainment (16.68%), Games (13.36%), Lifestyle (8.02%) and Utilities (7.13%).

Again, we had an app market before the iPhone. But it reached more of a niche audience, nothing like the mainstream phenomenon we’re seeing now. Companies are now making huge money in mobile apps including Rovio, which reportedly turned down a .25 billion acquisition offer from Zynga. Gartner has said it expects mobile apps to bring in billion in revenue this year, while Juniper Research believes app revenues can hit billion by 2015. It’s a mobile app world and we just live in it.

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There is a seemingly endless stream of food/restaurant rating/check-in apps popping up all the time. All of them aim to help you find good food, and many of them do it very well. Nosh is among the newer faces in the pack. The app wants to help people find the best thing to order, and eventually aims to use the feedback it gathers to help restaurants. It launched just three months ago from Firespotter Labs, whose CEO Craig Walker was one of the founders of Google Voice. The app now has 1 million ratings of dishes, and on Tuesday the company announced a series of updates, including the integration of Google Places.

Some of the other changes in version 2.0 of Nosh include:

• They finally snagged Nosh.com. Yes, when they launched the best they could do was Nosh.me.
• Besides an iOS and Android app, there’s now an interactive web interface for Nosh.
• Nosh is now international, going outside the U.S. for the first stime.

But the one that most impacts how people use the product is this: Integration with Google Places. Places is Google’s Yelp competitor, and clearly Nosh is competing with Yelp too, so that makes this Google marriage very convenient. Places integration means every restaurant, bar, bakery, brasserie, bistro and diner Google knows about is built into Nosh’s database of dining establishments. And that’s very helpful for what Nosh is trying to do, which is have millions of places and their full menus available in its database. With the help of Google, for any place a Nosh user could ever want to walk into, they can instantly see what’s available to order, what is recommended as the best thing to eat, and naturally, what to avoid based on low user ratings.

Another cool thing Nosh is trying has to do has to do with ratings. Recognizing that users can rate a lot of dishes a “5-star” (the highest rating), which eventually can dilute what “best” means, Nosh has added superlative options: If you rate something a five star or a one star, the app will ask you afterward whether it was the best dish you ever had or the worst. That will show up on your profile, and of course, you can continually change the best and worst things you’ve eaten.

Once that data is aggregated, “it makes it a little more interesting information,” Walker said, being deliberately vague about what Nosh would be doing with that. But it seems logical that a restaurant would be keen to know if its dish (or dishes) was the worst or best thing a diner had ever eaten.

Walker, who spoke to me by phone Tuesday, says this is all in preparation for much more to come in Nosh’s quest to use social and mobile tech to flip the restaurant business on its head.

“The reason I got in to this was I was going to put some money in a friend’s restaurant and I realized restaurant owners dont have very many tools. What they’re armed with is not great. How can we provide services that will make that picture a little clearer and how do you get the diner involved?” he asked.

“I don’t want to ask the waiter what’s good, I want to ask the guy who was eating here what’s good [...] We’re looking at Nosh as a perpetual evolution of the entire restaurant and dining experience.”

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In most ways, Charlie McDonnell is a very normal young British person. He’s 20, nearly 21. He has nice hair. He likes drinking tea. He shares a flat with one of his friends. He spends a lot of time online.

In other ways, however, McDonnell is utterly remarkable.

Four years ago, he started a YouTube channel called Charlie Is So Cool Like, and began posting fun videos and songs. It just kept growing until, over the summer, he became the first British YouTube user to break 1 million subscribers.

Thanks to his fame — in particular a large following of teenage girls — he’s tried his hand at TV presenting, been on the set of Doctor Who (his favorite show) and had a charity record in the British charts.

But what does it mean to have a million subscribers? And what opportunities has it created? I caught up with him to find out the secrets to becoming a YouTube superstar. It was pretty informative, not just for those who want to emulate his web success — but also for broadcasters wanting to learn from online success stories.

Gaining a YouTube following can be profitable

“I’ve been living off the back of my YouTube stuff — which isn’t just ad revenue, I sell albums and things like that as well — but I’ve been earning enough that I’ve been renting a flat with my flatmate Alex, who’s another video blogger. We’ve been living here for about a year and a half now; we’ve got to the point where we realized we’re earning enough to buy a house. And it’s all off the back of YouTube.”

Online video stars don’t necessarily see TV as their end goal

It’s traditional for television producers to try and pick out online talent, either for their raw talent or, sometimes, to harness their audience. But while some may still dream of being on network TV, Charlie is part of a generation that is increasingly seeing online media as their home — not broadcast.

“I’ve been contacted by various production companies and broadcasters, I’ve been approached by managers,” says McDonnell. “he general consensus from most people is ‘this thing online is pretty good, but when are you going to take it seriously and make a TV show?’.”

“For me, it’s always been hard to justify doing stuff on television. To an outsider it might seem like that’s your big break, but being able to learn about how TV works over the last couple of years, I’ve generally come to the conclusion that I much prefer doing stuff online — it’s freer for me.”

As far as the TV shows he has worked on, the producers often seemed to want his audience — when what they really needed was his total buy-in.

“It wasn’t beneficial for me in terms of building up an audience, but they assumed that my audience would go with me, which isn’t necessarily the case. It’s hard to get massively invested in projects when they come to you with an idea, because I feel like I’m just working for them. My own stuff, I’m happier telling my audience about.”

Control is vitally important

“People see me talking to the camera and think ‘he’s obviously the presenter’,” he says. “But that’s because that’s what they see me doing.”

In fact, he’s as interested in the ideas and the processes behind his videos as he is in being in front of camera. In the future he’d like to make short films and is even thinking about feature films. But it’s not just about getting his face on screen.

“They might think about the fact that I’m doing everything myself, but they won’t give it much thought whether I’d be interested in producing a show. It’s hard for people to take me as anything other than a presenter.”

Don’t target demographics

“From what I know the demographic I have is sought-after, it’s 13-18 year old girls, it’s the biggest demographic I have,” he says. “But I’m in the position where I didn’t sit down and think ‘how could I appeal to 17 year old girls’. I just made videos, and that happens to be the people who are watching. There’s still enough people outside that demographic that I don’t want to ignore them — it’s important for me not to think about demographics at all.”

He won’t be lured away

I can’t count the number of times people building video platforms have told me that part of their plan is to lure big YouTube channels away. But it’s a mistake to imagine that you simply by offering them more money — or even more viewers, he says.

“Right now YouTube is where all the people go. I do like websites like Vimeo — YouTube can, at times, be people making videos because they want to trick people into giving them views — but at the same time there aren’t as many people watching videos there. So it’s very hard for you to make it into your job.”

“But YouTube is not a faceless website any more. When you’ve been making videos for as long as we have, we have direct contact with the people who work there. It feels much more like a partnership I have with them. I really don’t think there would be any other competitor that would convince me to leave. Even if there was another site that became more popular, I still feel very strong ties to YouTube, and I’d want to work with them to make YouTube top dog again.”

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