We, as a collective, have learned about what works and what doesn’t work, at a level of granularity beyond what you’ll find in book.

“EatMe, PinchMe, KickMe” - obviously a joke, but I can comment intelligently on why these sorts of apps would fail on Facebook. It boils down to marketing and demographics - also understanding your consumer. Are the huge apps trivial? Maybe, but any person who understands the ingredient necessary to cross the 1M user threshold on FB has valuable knowledge in other contexts.

If crossing 400K ACTIVE users were that easy, send hotness would not be the 17th ranked app (with that metric) today.

http://adonomics.com/leaderboa.....p;filter=0

Haha, Guess Who on Facebook is actually a great idea.

“Is your person a wanker?”

“Yes.”

“Wait, that means everyone on my board stays up. Erm… is your person a trendwhore?”

And so on until the world’s merciful end.

In all markets capturing distribution channel is key. Engagement can come later, but first you need to be occupying the shelf space.

For those who cant get access to this excellent course, for only $24.95 you can buy “The Idea Virus” by Seth Godin.

what people fail to realize in congratulating these apps is that they’re merely copycat apps of already successful applications.

send hotness basically stole their idea from hotness.
http://apps.facebook.com/thehotness/

“Think your friends are hot? Let them know by adding them to your Hot Friends list! Get friends to add you to boost your own Hotness level.”

whereas send hotness is:
“Spread the love - tell your friends you think they’re hot! They’ll probably do the same back to you. Start sending HOTNESS now, and see where you rank among your hottest friends!”

apparently, one of the developers who made send hotness also made “a second graffiti” application. figures.

i can’t wait for the user-engagement apps. i like where noah is going with his guess who application, and i only wish high-use apps get rewarded as much if not more than spam apps.

Social networks, in the form of Facebook and others in recent years, are new media forms. Online community has been around as long as the Well and Compuserve and the early BBSs (longer if you go back to what was happening between scientists on ARPAnet), but multimedia GUI/publishing, ease-of-use and ubiquitous fast connectivity provided a transformation and fuelled explosive growth.

Alongside such growth comes economic potential, so there’s bound to be a lot of experimentation and much roadkill - that’s the history of all media. Seems like the Stanford class is stepping right into the melee. For those who damn these applications as a waste of time, I guess you never watched network television or read a tabloid newspaper or a trashy magazine - because God forbid anyone should waste any time and have fun. “All media attention must be worthy!” Please ….

There have been many media empires built on trash. Some of those businesses remained steadfastly trashy, others used their cashflows to produce much higher-brow product and mix it up. I find the techie intellectual snobbery here is naive and misses the bigger picture. I believe Facebook apps are analogous to programming on other media - creative endeavours built on a platform which are designed to capture attention in the hope of being able to monetize it. A handful will become economically successful, maybe one or two will change the world for the better and win some awards, cementing their place in popular culture. Most will fail and be consigned to oblivion.

I too delete most app invites because I find them tedious, but dare not judge others who are innovating in a new space and the audiences who are experimenting along with them. No harm done bar a few lines of code I suppose, unless we want to start an argument about the carbon footprint of Facebook apps …

Excerpt from 60 minutes on Millennials
Stand back all bosses! A new breed of American worker is about to attack everything you hold sacred: from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie. They are called, among other things, “millennials.” There are about 80 million of them, born between 1980 and 1995, and they’re rapidly taking over from the baby boomers who are now pushing 60.

They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it.

———-
God forbid, work ethic in this country (USA) has gone down the toilet. This pretty much sets the stage for hungry countries like China, India, Russia, etc to overtake US as the world leaders, it’s happening already.

One is on self expression and opinions
Check it out “if you get time” http://apps.facebook.com/ithinkapp
You can post opinions, what you feel etc and people can then agree/disagree on them.
You can start a opinion like Techcrunch Post quality has gone down.. AGREE|DISAGREE. and see what happens when people around the world start voting on it. The discussions are also very interesting…

There are some others like Travelpod-challenge which lets you play an atlas game… a good stress buster i must say…

That being said, it is obvious the purpose of this class was to understand Facebook as a community. I’m sure these students have a great understanding of viral patterns on Facebook, retention rates, etc.

Over time we will see clever apps that can gain users at astonishing rates with little to no formal marketing.

to be accurate, i co-teach the class with Professor BJ Fogg, who runs the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, along with lots of help from Yee Lee (ex-Slide) & Jia Shen (RockYou), as well as our TAs (Dan Ackerman, Rob Fan, & Greg Schwartz). also the students number about 75-80 across 25 teams, and have built ~30 apps to date (the list of most of our Stanford student apps are here).

@ all the naysayers on this post: you’re entitled to your opinions on the merits of the class and/or the apps, but i challenge you to find another class where students can learn & apply their knowledge to generate such astonishing & measurable results in such a short time period.

while the goals of the class were not exclusively distribution-focused, it’s been impressive to see not 1 but 2 student teams create apps that in barely a month have registered 1M+ installs and 100K+ daily users. while the apps may indeed be straightforward & lighthearted, we’ve been amazed at the ability of our students to learn & implement viral methods on the Facebook Platform so successfully. and beyond the 2 apps noted, another 10 apps have registered 10K+ installs and 1K+ daily users — still quite respectable for student projects.

whether or not these apps are “useful” or simply entertaining i feel is missing the point — our goals for the class were to learn about building apps on Facebook, to understand recent viral techniques for customer acquisition on socially-aware application platforms, and to learn how to apply metrics & analytics in product design & product marketing. based solely on those objectives, we’re pretty happy with the results.

note: in addition to app objectives that were distribution-oriented, we also have a second set of objectives around apps that are user-engagement focused. we’re working on these apps now, and hope to have a few of them finished by the end of the year.

for more info on the class, please visit the class website at:
http://captology.stanford.edu/facebook/

- dave mcclure
class co-instructor

For those who complain about the avalanche of apps that are merely wrappers for the invite friends functionality–I consider myself part of this camp–the real person to direct this criticism to is facebook. The platform makes these type of apps not just possible, but incredibly easy. And developers have seen how successful this genre can be (the jury is still out as to why people would install 20 different versions of “poke”). So from a responding to enviroment perspective, it is no surprise that the vast majority of popular apps have followed this approach.

My team wanted to build something more substantial and focus on deep and continuous engagement. We adopted the classic board game Guess Who? and turned it social by creating boards with the faces of mutual friends when one person challenges another to a game (http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=5225434263). We’ve had the app released for two weeks, and despite some major server problems, we’re only 100 users away from 1,000 daily active users (25% active user %). This is not bad, but it is far from the astounding growth of KissMe and Send Hotness.

What we care more about are metrics like:
- The average visitor goes to 7.6 pages. Nearly 7% of visitors go to 20+ pages–that is a veritable marathon for a web application.
- The average visitor spends over 6.5 minutes on the app.
- Perhaps most important, over 60% of our users have used the app more than 10 times.

I am thoroughly impressed with how many users KissMe and Send Hotness have acquired. At the same time, I am happy with the engagement metrics, despite relatively modest user numbers, our own app has garnered. Two different goals, two seemingly successful outcomes.