I went to a Facebook Developer Garage event recently in San Francisco. It was a pseudo barcamp style event thrown by RockYou and some of the biggest names in FB app dev were there, waxing economic on the state of the Facebook nation. Going to this event was a bit of an eye opener. It became clear to me that incorporating “viral”, spammy features into the very DNA of your Facebook application is a critical success factor. I’ve spent months working on something that I think is really cool. But apparently really cool is not enough. I need to think more like a 16 year old girl.

There’s a whole slew of “throwaway apps“, which are really simple, totally spammy and provide a short burst of entertainment value, followed by absolutely nothing. They’re built in a couple hours and go on to get hundreds of thousands of users. I personally find them completely useless - people are literally just stamping out the same app over and over again. But… so far their strategy is working pretty well. I wonder how long this will last.

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