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I think it also highly depends on the "stickyness" of your app. E.g. for me, seeing a rating number is a one-time event... then I move on. Even a site like Klout that measures your "social media" rating over time gets really boring unless there is a lot of movement. I think the stickyness would increase if there is/was a reason to use the app several times a week.
The StackExchange network is intended for Q&A only. By limiting the "social network" aspects of a forum the quality of the site to ask questions and get answers massively improves. Your best bet if you want to get into some real-time chat with the members of this (and in particular the StackOverflow site) is to go to the chat section: chat.stackoverflow.com
JSON format was specifically picked to ensure speedy transport of the data (XML is much more verbose than JSON) and is the preferred format for REST based services today. I'd highly advise adopting using JSON format on 'your' end too. (regardless of the app)
Looks good! I'm not sure how the search is supposed to work but I find if I type 2 or more words I often get zero results. I take it that it is doing an AND condition thus if I type too many unrelated words (e.g. natural search) I won't get any matches. oh, and it is exact word matches.. so "xmlht" won't match on "XMLHTTPRequest" until I type the whole word. ;-)
heh heh... I was trying to keep mine on the hush hush until I finished it... but it looks like yours might see the light of day before mine. Best of luck it looks great and well, I guess I wasn't the only one thinking this! ;-)
