Ranking applications and increasing your exposure to users

We have gotten many questions about how we rank applications in the app gallery and how an app developer can increase their exposure to users.  I'd like to offer a brief explanation about our current and long-term goals regarding application ranking.

    First of all, I wanted to state that our ultimate goal is to provide the richest, most engaging experience to our users.  To this end, we plan on offering application developers a variety of incentives/penalties for providing a positive/negative user experience.

    At launch we do not have much data to work with, so we decided to provide a randomized application gallery until we have enough data to provide a meaningful sort order of applications.  We feel that this will provide the most level playing field initially and let the applications speak for themselves.

    As soon as we switch over to using metrics to determine the sort order, we will offer an explanation as to how you can improve your engagement score.  The general guidelines we will follow should be fairly self-explanatory.  Actions such as installs, views and accepted invites will be positive influences, while rejected invites, blocked applications and removes will be negative influences.