Today’s Next supplement of The Age describes examples of Web 2.0 entrepreneurs leveraging Facebook to rapidly accelerate user take-up of their applications. Lee Lorenzen, CEO of Shop.Com spent nine years to get 500,000 registered users, but then “Facebook application iLike, from developer Rockyou, added 600,000 users in eight hours”. It works by a Facebook user adding the application after having been invited to do so by a friend.
Call it what you will – viral marketing, the Participative Web, the open & innovative dynamic of the internet - Lorenzen’s experience is an excellent example of web-based innovation and scale advantage, and leveraging the network effects of social networks.
Through opening up their platform to third-party applications developers, Facebook benefits from a virtuous circle-like retention and growth of their user-base.
Another pointer from the article was to the Facebook Developers Garage phenomenon.
And just one other message from this informative article – an observation from Dr Marcus Weichselbaum, CEO o f applications developer TheBroth, that “People within Facebook have everything they need within Facebook. They do not want to go to an outside website” – a view that resonates with my earlier point about the potential for social networks sites to be a hub for entertainment, news, information, connecting with friends – and shopping!
