Snowball Effect & Viral Heaven

So, the answer to the quesiton everyone's been asking: WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF SOCIAL APPLICATION PLATFORMS LIKE OPEN SOCIAL AND FACEBOOK'S APP PLATFORM????

YOUR WHOLE SITE LIVES WITHIN THESE NETWORKS!

If you can monetize your website, then you can more than monetize it within these social infrastructures. The idea is that the users of these networks are provided tools to recommend your application/site to other users or "friends" in the given social network (e.g. Myspace, Facebook, Linkedin, etc) who trust their opinion. This happens currently through several main methods:

1) widget box on their profile

2) widget box on their private dashboard

3) invite your friend tools

4) notifications to your friends of what you're doing (via notification tools within the network as well as generated emails)

5) and probably more methods in the future

IF YOU CAN MONETIZE YOUR APP, YOU CAN MONETIZE IT BETTER WITHIN THESE NETWORKS. Ultimately, the said "container" network just has a header above the design of your app (and a left column in the case of Facebook). You can design your app to be anyway you want and include any features you want, from ads to e-commerce. People need to wipe the paradigm from their mind that these apps are stupid give-your-friend-a-beer games. These sort of apps are slowly becoming less interesting to users on Facebook, and Facebook itself is shifting that paradigm by making it harder for bad apps to get coverage throughout the app. With several changes they've already made and are in the process of making (e.g. tabbed profiles, "show more profile boxes," etc), it is clear Facebook is trying to force users to take a sort of ownership of their apps and essentially put the responsibility on the Facebook user to share his app with his friends, rather than before where the apps just cluttered users profiles and sent a million notifications to all their friends. This sort of ownership will lead to users promoting only very good and relevant apps. I also think the give-each-other-a-beer trend was kind of a novel effect and will in itself be less interesting to people as extremely powerful apps start to popup--people don't give each other e-cards all day, but they do use stock trading tools all day (social trading being a perfect example of a very powerful social app that will be one of these highly used apps within these networks).

I actually wrote this whole speel in a Meetup.com mailing list and someone there said that building such apps will be part of the cost of entry for web 2.87 companies to be successful. I would totally agree. I often advise my budget-strapped clients to build a Facebook or Open Social app before their own website as the ROI will be so much higher, especially if you're able to ride the Open Social wave right now where first movers will certainly benefit from increased traffic simple because the apps are new to users (although not as much as the real first time with Facebook). It's unfortunate that you have to do all sorts of make request ajaxy techniques with the single canvas page you get with Open Social, but the goal eventually is to "WRITE ONCE, READ EVERYWHERE," including for your own website! Therefore, you could build something that exists within Open Social as well as on your own domain.

I think the one thing people are not understanding when they question the significance of social apps is the fact that users from the these apps can be your actual user base if you develop your app accordingly. For instance, you can have Myspace users in Facebook and Facebook users in Myspace. Many of the top apps already do this. WHAT ABOUT DATA THAT EITHER NETWORK LEGALLY SAYS YOU CANNOT SHARE OUTSIDE OF THEIR NETWORK? You can persist (permanently store) user's first names as well as any information a user provides to you via forms in your own app. So until you get users to fill out such forms, you at least have their first name. One thing they won't let you persist is their user thumbnail. Many top apps from development companies like Water-Cooler Inc. (which does all the sports team apps and the TV show apps, etc) do things like generate a random thumbnail to represent you or simply create a question mark in the style of the said network the user came from--i.e. Facebook users have a Facebook-style question mark in Myspace and Myspace users have a Myspace style question mark in Facebook, and as more networks like Hi5 join the pack, the same would go for them. (FYI, I recommend the latter of these two ways to address user thumbnails--I don't like the random profile pic generated of a kitty or a panda or something)...So anyway, that abeing said, the point is these users can come to your website on your own domain and already have a profile and even account to login to and no registration forms to fill out. The problem people who are questioning social apps are having is they can't wrap their head around this or even see this as a possibility. Traditionally, you'd have to buy tons of ad-space to get users to your app, and once they were their they could only invite people via email. Now you can spend some marketing dollars maybe with Facebook's behavioral targeting ad system for apps and "Pages" and get a snowball effect going where ultimately you don't need to spend any more ad dollars.

...I'm going to get into the "Snowball effect" and how to achieve viral heavn with your app in my next article. So I'm not going to get into that yet.

Anyway, hopefully some of this info is helpful. Post some comments if you disagree or have more to add.