Jai Shen from Rock You:
Launch an application with a marketing and validation test. Test the audience, messaging, and channels (different viral channels on each platform). News feed, notifications, email, profile, invites, profile action, non user pages and profile are different channels to think about. Understand your application vertical like channel, content, quiz, games, gifts, and self expression. Messaging is all about the call to actions. Do users like it and does it work. Once you have the app built and messaging working well focus on groath. Viral groath is when one user causes at least one user to install the app. The largest part of app development is tuning. Track everything, Graph it and trend it. Manage your notification and invite allocations and notification spam blocking. Rock you suggests to be consurvative at the beginning until you understand your response. Then get more aggressive when you have confidence in your invites. This will ensure that your app does not get penalized in the beggining while you are building your app. Once you have grown your app focus on user engagement. Saturated social circles and tune for a better user experience. Rock You has apps that have had invites that have gone to every user in facebook. That is saturated!
Virality. grow outside the core group of users. Get users to spread to others. Dont hurt your user experience. Many people forget that a good user experience will be the biggest factor in making an app viral. Non user pages have worked well for rock you to engage users before they install. Many users want to see the app before they install.
OpenSocial has some challenges. The audience is different. It has a huge audience and has a promiscuity factor. Open social has a different user model. Scrapbook is big in Orkut. OpenSocial channels – news feeds (most people on open social are not really using yet), Profile, main page, bulletins, messaging and invites and non user pages. There is still a lot in the air with Open social. From a business perspective, Rock you sees not difference in opensocial as facebook. Focus on apps that are not dependent on viral channels.
Tyler Ballance from Slide. Facebook platform
Before you start understand the platform. What data is available? Understand the audience of the platform. What can the API do? Beebo still has just a subset of the functionality that facebook has to their developers.
Going cross platform. One approach is sharing the exact same code base. This has worked for top friends. Another option is to copy the code and change up the UI. This is what fun wall did. Use consistant branding when you go cross platform. Users start to recognize top development companies and this gets them more trust with the users. Use FBML so that you get the look and feel that matches the site.
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