After just over three months, Oink, the first app from Digg founder Kevin Rose’s new company Milk, will close its doors. The app was described as a ‘way to rate and rank the things around you,’ and billed itself as a ratings engine not just for places, but the things inside.

The app was downloaded some 100k times in just the first three weeks and hit the 150k download mark in just over a month. It will be shut down as of March 31st.

In a notice on the site, the Milk team says that its purpose as a company is to “rapidly build and test out new ideas” and that Oink was its first ‘test’. It has now decided to shut it down to focus on its next project.

Rose said in December that the service had over 40,000 active users and that it tracked “hundreds of thousands of Oinks” and “millions of sessions”.

The team thanks everyone who used the app and contributed their ratings and items to the database. The notice seems to emphasize that the Oink app was primarily about gathering data.

We are extremely grateful for all of your effort finding and rating the best things in the places around you. We’ve discovered thousands of awesome pizzas, pastas, coffees, teas… and roller coasters, zoo exhibits, paintings, sculptures, vistas… and sodas, salads, sliders, soups… and so much more.

This is an interesting case. It seems like the group designed, built and shipped a pretty slick ratings app all in a bid to gather data. Rather than mine existing databases or pay other companies to license their information, they were able to garner attention via the app launch and gather their own. And the data that they got appears to be more granular than most sites like Yelp or Foursquare.

The team signs off with “So long and thanks for all the Oinks! More news from us soon.”

Perhaps we’ll be finding out just how the team is going to be using the data its gathered with its Oink test. If you were a religious user of Oink, you can enter your username or email address to download all of your data from the Oink site here.

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Kevin Rose’s Milk shutters its first app Oink after just over 3 months