Presented by BJ Fogg. Sharing some secrets that have never been shared before. At stanford they had a class where teams built facebooks. They had 5 apps that got over 1 million users and had 10 apps get over 100k users. This was a big success. They started the class and did not know what they where doing. They expected 20-40 users and ended up with over 120 the first day. Ended up with 7 teachers and 80 students. They got some great press coverage. Students started meeting outside of class and still get together. $500k-$1Million in revenue at least 3 companies where formed. At least 2 companies where acquired.
Learnings from the class. #1. It is never to late to create a winning app. #2 the simple apps won. Apps need to be simple and easy. #3 speed and flexibility in launch and iterations. #4 community cooperation leads to success. Students helped others #5 individual opinions about apps are worthless. dont be swayed by one persons opinion. #6 Copying success is a cheap fast way to succeed. Novelty inst the best approach to apps. $7 metrics do matter, but todays tools are too weak. Instrument your apps to track success #10 mass interpersonal persuasion is finally here. Persuasion, social network, observable impact, fast cycle, easy to do, automated.
I was a bit disappointed by this presentation. I was already familiar with what they did there. They did not talk about the psychology behind the apps much. They went over their learnings very quickly. We built out app at this same time and achieved 2 million users in 10 weeks for our we’re related app. But our app is a real app and not a toy like these students created. And our app continues to grow.
application building, facebook, gspwest08, Social Networking
Presented by Benjamin Link from Facebook. They are trying to create the frictionless platform.
User objective: help users communicate ad share information more efficiently, generating more meaningful activity, providing valuable information to users, increasing value to the users. Value to users means value to developers of facebook apps. This creates a more seamless level of activity.
Enhanced site experience. Expanded and interactive wall where users can generate their own content, friends can write posts. Additional tabs on the profile where users can add their favorite apps. This will be a great ui enhancement.
Seeing an increase in app usage. 99% of all users have used at least one app. Most have 6 or more apps installed. Long term value to developers and businesses.
Sharing proven technology, tools and architecture. Licensing their technology to partners like beebo. They claim that this makes their platform open. I don’t think this makes it open. They have launched the platform developers marketplace. Match developers to major brands. They are working on mass distribution via localization. They used their users to translate the site and then got feedback from users. Now you can get facebook in spanish. This will greatly expand their market. They say these same language translation tools will be available to facebook app devlopers. This will launch “very very shortly”.
Providing core infrastructure and resources. Applications should use the social graph and then leverage the social graph. Timing is less important when interacting online. Interact when you can. Timing of communication is very important and helps the communication be more efficient. Facebook photos is the largest online photos app in the world because it is plugged into the social graph. Facebook wants world class apps that leverage the social graph. Some of the top apps now are entertainment. New apps are more about productivity and more useful applications. They are building commerce functionality into the system. Build native support for accepting credit cards into the developer apis. That will be awesome! He says this will launch very soon (later this year).
Enabling viral distribution to over 66 million active users. Create the best user experience available. Jacking users around has been a big problem on facebook. Like forced invites. Facebook is putting control of these types of poorly designed apps in the hands of the users. Users can report poor experience. Facebook wants apps with a long term view of the world and that put the user first. Facebook now monitors activities like invites and accepted invites. Apps that create good content and functionality get more privlages on the system. Personally I think this is the only way that they can keep a good user experience on Facebook. Our app can now send more invites per user because we have a good conversion rate.
application, development, facebook, gspwest08, social networks
