One could say it’s an software update tracker that tracks all the good free software of this world. The first week saw a nice start of the service although there has not been much coverage besides the initial three blog posts linked above. The RSS feed subscriber count is scratching at 1000 subscribers. The 50 Twitter followers would bring the total count above the 1k mark which is great for such a young service.

I have added the RSS feed to the sidebar here at Ghacks which will from now on display the five latest software updates that directly link to the software developer sites. If you have not already subscribed to the Appnews feed I suggest you do so as it will keep you up to date with software developments of great programs that have been covered at our sites.

We are still collecting ideas on how to proceed from here. Some suggestions are offering a widget for websites to include, a directory of programs that are monitored and the inclusion of additional websites that provide the same expertise and quality in their free software reviews.

Rarst did all the work on the project with me and Samer doing a little bit of beta testing. It’s his project that we fully support. You can take a look a the appnews website to see how it looks and subscribe to the various update notification options.

Rarst made an announcement post where he is going into a little bit more detail on the technicalities. The service is basically a mashup of Rss, Dropbox, FeedBurner and SimplePie.

Here are the direct access links:

Home: http://appnews.net/
Feed: http://feeds.appnews.net/appnews
Email subscription: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=appnews&loc=en_US
Twitter: http://twitter.com/appnews
Search engine: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=014146561317267595789:1f-ivlvlh7y

Feel free to leave comments here or at Rarst’s blog. Suspect that Samer will introduce the service on his blog as well soon. We would also like it very much if you would blog about it, send it to your friends, comment about it on other sites or add it to social media sites that you are a member of. We think that this service is something special. And there is of course growth potential to add additional review sites to the mix.