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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2 Users Commented In This Post
12-3-2007 at 10:54:38 from 67.72.118.244
It’s crucial to not think about this, because it will drive you crazy and there is nothing you can do about it.
The question you do have control over is whether you want to be high-end or low-end.
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11-5-2008 at 17:47:24 from 208.97.143.96
[...] At social app conferences, developers were told to gear their apps toward 16 year old girls, who were drawn toward the latest fads and more than willing to spam all their friends with invite requests. Around this time, many began to observe the irrationality of these apps and their lack of long term viability. [...]
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