FF -- How to use Facebook and Open Social Apps, distributed communities.
Lawrence Coburn, Rateitall - Distributed Community
Four pillars of a distributed web strategy
- Widgets - Photobucket, MyBlogLog
- Toolbars/Extensions - Google, StumbleUpon, Adaptive Blue
- Apps: Facebook and Open Social - iLike, RockYou, HotorNot
- API - Yahoo Maps
RockYou has 78 million apps live on Facebook. 95 milion across other networks. 150 million page views a day. They'll add an ad network on their app to make money.
People have a lot of time on their hands on Facebook. It has unmatched user acquisition potential. Like SEO and PPC, it's another distribution mode. Distribution is not the challenge on Facebook. Engagement is the challenge. So they key question is, how do you make your widget more useful. There's 6,000 apps available on Facebook at this stage.
* Open Social is live on MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, LinkedIn, ning and Orkut amongst others and is the answer to Facebooks platform.
* Facebook lets you keep all the revenue that you develop on you web app on Facebook.
Think about how the social aspects of your site could be plugged into existing networks of people. Identify your best content an functionality: modularize it and set it free. Buy an initial installs base from RockYou. (Rateitall cost 50c a user to seed.)
- Engage users immediately
- Mimic the look and feel of Facebook to use the trust levels
- Enable self expression
- Make it dynamic
- Expose friend activity. See what friends are doing.
- Browse the social graph. ...and their friends of friends.
- Drive communication
- Build Communities (e.g. carve-outs)
- Solve real world tasks
