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Nick O'Neil of AllFacebook.com recently posted a blog entry entitled The Future of Widgets on Facebook: Dead where he wrote

As a joke I created the Bush Countdown Clock when the platform launched and amazingly I attracted close to 50,000 users. While the application was nothing more than a simple flash badge, it helped a lot of people express themselves. Expression is not Facebook’s purpose though, sharing is. Widgets or badges that help users express their personal beliefs, ideals, and personality are now harder to find with the new design.

Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.
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It’s clear though that widgets have not survived the shift over and my guess is that within a matter of weeks we will see most top-performing widget applications practically disappear.

This is one aspect of the Facebook redesign that I didn't consider in my original post on What You Can Learn from the Facebook Redesign. Although moving the various applications which are basically badges for self expression like Bumper Sticker does reduce page load times, by relegating them to an infrequently visited tab they are guaranteed to be less useful (people don't see them on my profile) and less likely to be spread virally (people don't see them on my profile and say "I gotta have that"). On the other hand, applications that are primarily about users interacting with each other such as Scrabble and We're Related should still do fine.

Application developers have already started inventing workarounds to Facebook's changes which penalize their apps. For example, the Bumper Sticker application now focuses on adding items to your Mini-Feed instead of adding a badge/box to your profile. This gives it valuable placement on your profile (if only for a short time) and a small chance that it will show up in the News Feeds of your friends.

This aspect of the redesign has definitely attacked what many had started calling the MySpace-ization of Facebook which resulted in the need for a  Facebook Profile Clean Up Tool. It will be interesting what this will lead to new classes of applications becoming popular on the site or whether it just another chapter in the cat & mouse game that is spreading virally on the Facebook platform.

Now Playing: Game - We Don't Play No Games (feat. G-Unit)

I've been using the redesigned Facebook profile and homepage for the past few days and thought it would be useful to write up my impressions on the changes. Facebook is now the the world's most popular social networking site and one of the ways they've gotten there is by being very focused on listening to their users and improving their user experienced based on this feedback. Below are screenshots of the old and new versions of the pages and a discussion of which elements are changed and the user scenarios the changes are meant to improve.

Homepage Redesign

OLD HOME PAGE:

NEW HOME PAGE:

The key changes and their likely justifications are as follows

• Entry points for creating content are now at the top of the news feed. One of the key features driving user engagement on Facebook is the News Feed. This lets a user know what is going on with their social network as soon as they logon to the site. In a typical example of network effects at work, one person creates some content by uploading a photo or sharing a link and hundreds of people on their friend list benefit by having content to view in their News Feed. If any of the friends responds to the content this again benefits hundreds of people and so on.  The problem with the old home page was that a user sees their friends uploading photos and sharing links and may want to do so as well but there is no easy way for her to figure out how to do the same thing without having to go two or three clicks away from the home page. The entry points at the top of the feed will encourage more "impulse" content creation.

• Left sidebar is gone. There were three groups of items in the left nav; a search box, the list of a user's most frequently accessed applications and an advertisement. The key problem is that the ad is in a bottom corner of the feed. This makes it easy for users to mentally segregate that part of the screen from their vision and either never look there or completely ignore it. Removing that visual ghetto and moving ads to being inline with the feed makes it more likely that users will look at the ad. Ah, but now you need more room to show the ad (all the space isn't needed for news feed stories). So the other elements of the left nave are moved, the search box to the header and the list of most accessed applications to the sidebar on the right. Now you have enough room to stretch out the News Feed's visible area and advertisers can reuse their horizontal banner ads on Facebook even though this makes the existing feed content now look awkward. This is one place where monetization trumped usability.

• Comments now shown inline for News Feed items with comments (not visible in screen shot). This may be the feature that made Mike Arrington decide to call the new redesign the FriendFeedization of Facebook. Sites like FriendFeed have proven that showing the comments on an item in the feed inline gives users more content to view in their feeds and increases the likelihood of engagement since the user may want to join the conversation.

Profile Redesign

OLD PROFILE:

NEW PROFILE:

The key changes and their likely justifications are as follows

• The profile now has tabbed model for navigation. This is a massive improvement for a number of reasons. The most important one is that in the old profile, there is a lot of content below the fold. My old profile page is EIGHT pages when printed as opposed to TWO pages when the new profile page is printed. Moving to a tabbed model (i) improves page load times and (ii) increases number of page views and hence ad impressions.

• The Mini-Feed and the Wall have been merged. The intent here is to give more visibility to the Wall which in the old model was below the fold. The "guest book" or wall is an important part of the interaction model in social networking sites (see danah boyd's Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? essay) and Facebook was de-emphasizing theirs in the old model.

• Entry points for creating content are at the top of the profile page. Done for the same reason as on the Home page. You want to give users lots of entry points for adding content to the site so that they can kick off network effects by generating content which in turn generates tasty page views.

• Left sidebar is gone. Again the left sidebar is gone and the advertisement is moved closer to the content, and away from the visual ghetto that is the bottom left of the screen. Search box and most accessed applications are now in the header as well. The intent here is also to improve the likelihood that users will view and react to the ads.

Now Playing: Da Back Wudz - I Don't Like The Look Of It (Oompa)

 At the end of February of this year, I wrote a post entitled No Contest: FriendFeed vs. The Facebook News Feed where I argued that it would be a two month project for an enterprising developer at Facebook to incorporate all of the relevant features of FriendFeed that certain vocal bloggers had found so enticing. Since then we've had two announcements from Facebook

From A new way to share with friends on April 15th

we've introduced a way for you to import activity from other sites into your Mini-Feed (and into your friends' News Feeds).

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we'll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.

From on We're Open For Commentary on June 25th (Yesterday)

In the past, you've been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but if there was something else on your friend's profile—an interesting status, or a cool new friendship—you'd need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it. But starting today, you can comment on your friends' Mini-Feed stories right from their profile.

Now you can easily converse around friends' statuses, application stories, new friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written.

It took a little longer than two months but it looks like I was right. For some reason Facebook isn't putting the comment bubbles in the news feed but I assume that is only temporary and they are trying it out in the mini-feed first.

FriendFeed has always seemed to me to be a weird concept for a stand alone application. Why would I want to go to whole new site and create yet another friend list just to share what I'm doing on the Web with my friends? Isn't that what social networking sites are for? It just sounds so inconvenient, like carrying around a pager instead of a mobile phone.

As I said in my original post on the topic, all FriendFeed has going for it is the community that has built around the site. Especially since the functionality it provides can be easily duplicated and actually fits better as a feature of an existing social networking site. The question is whether that community is the kind that will grow into making it a mainstream success or whether it will remain primarily a playground for Web geeks despite all the hype (see del.icio.us as an example of this). So far, the chance of the latter seems strong. For comparison, consider the growth curve of Twitter against that of FriendFeed on Google Trends and Alexa.  Which seems more likely to one day have the brand awareness of a Flickr or a Facebook?

Now Playing: Bob Marley - I Shot The Sheriff

Several months ago, danah boyd wrote a rather insightful post entitled one company, ten brands: lessons from retail for tech companies which contained the following pieces of wisdom

Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I'd love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
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Unfortunately, I don't think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they're flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies' brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don't. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
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teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they're for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is "so middle school" and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke t with, it's at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn't they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption "10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor."
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I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.

If you're creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that'll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand... If you're buying a well-established brand, don't flatten it, especially if it's loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don't treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.

As danah boyd points out above, as companies enter the new markets they bring their baggage brands along with them. When the brand doesn't mesh with the target audience then it is hard to get traction. Creating new brands that are distanced from the established brand is often a good idea in this case. An excellent example of this is Microsoft's branding strategy with XBox. With XBox, Microsoft created a new brand that distanced itself from the company's staid office productivity and accounting software roots but still let people know that the software powerhouse was behind the brand (notice how there is no mention of Microsoft until you scroll to the bottom of XBox.com?) .

But why did Microsoft need to create a new brand in the first place? Why couldn't it have just been called Windows Gaming Console or "Microsoft Gaming Console"? You should be able to figure out the answers to these questions if you are familiar with the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding. I particularly like laws #2 and #10 excerpted below

The Law of Contraction: A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus. By narrowing the focus to a single category, a brand can achieve extraordinary success. Starbucks, Subway and Dominos Pizza became category killers when they narrowed their focus.

The Law of Extensions: The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything. More than 90% of all new product introductions in the U.S. are line extensions. Line extensions destroy brand value by weakening the brand. The effects can be felt in diminished market share of the core brand, a loss of brand identity, and a cannibalization of the one's own sales. Often, the brand extension directly attacks the strength of the core brand. Does Extra Strength Tylenol imply that regular Tylenol isn't strong enough?

Historically, the software companies have built brands based on what their customers want to do instead of who their customers are. So we've ended up with a lot of task based brands like Google™ for Web searching, Adobe Photoshop™ for photo editing, or Microsoft PowerPoint™ for creating presentations.  These brands come from a world where software is utilitarian and is simply a tool for getting things done as opposed to being an integral part of people's identities and lifestyle. This means that a lot of software companies don't have experience building brands around people's personal experiences and background. With the rise of social software, we've entered a world where software is no longer just a tool for individual tasks but a key part of how millions of people interact with each other and present themselves every day. The old rules no longer apply.

In today's world, the social software you use says as much about you as the brand of clothes you wear or the kind of watch you rock. The average LinkedIn  user is different from the average Facebook user who is different from the average MySpace user even though they are all social networking sites.  Like weekend warriors who work a boring 9-5 during the week and get crunk on the weekends, people who utilize multiple social networking sites often do so to express different sides of their personality or to interact with different sets of friends as opposed to going back and forth based on the features of the sites.

This means that he utilitarian software brand doesn't really work well in this world. It isn't about having the best features or being the best site for social networking, it is about being the best place for me and my friends to hang out online. When put in those terms it is unsurprising that social networking sites are often dominant in specific geographic regions with no one site being globally dominant.

All of this is a long winded way of saying that sticking to a single brand, even if it is just the company name, gets in the way of breaking into new markets when it comes to "Web 2.0". Slapping Google or Yahoo! in front of a brand may make it more likely to be used by a certain segment of the population but it also places constraints on what can be done with those services due to people's expectations of the brand. There is a reason why Flickr eventually killed Yahoo! Photos and why it was decided that Google Video be relegated to being a search brand while YouTube would be the social sharing brand. The brand baggage and the accompanying culture made them road kill.

This is one situation where startups have an inherent advantage over the established Web players because they don't have any brand baggage holding them back. It is easy to be nimble and try out new things when there are no fixed expectations from your product team or your users about what your application is supposed to be.

With their recent acquisitions the established Web players like Yahoo! and Google are learning what other industries have learned over time; sometimes it pays to have different brands for different audiences.

NOTE: Creating different brands for different audiences is not the same as having lots of overlapping brands with  unclear differentiation.

Now Playing: Outkast - Hollywood Divorce (feat. Lil' Wayne & Snoop Doggy Dogg)

Disclaimer: This post does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, strategies or future intentions of my employer. These are solely my personal opinions. If you are seeking official position statements from Microsoft, please go here.

Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace each describing a way for other web sites to integrate the user profiles and friends lists from these popular social networking sites. Given that I'm a big fan of social networking sites and interoperability between them, this seemed like an interesting set of announcements. So I decided to take a look at these announcements especially given the timing of them.  

What Do They Have in Common?

Marc Canter does a good job of describing the underlying theme behind all three announcements in his post I do not compromise where he writes

three announcements that happened within a week of each other: MySpace’s Data Availability, Facebook’s Connect and Google’s Friend Connect - ALL THREE had fundamentally the same strategy!

They’re all keeping their member’s data on their servers, while sending out tentacles to mesh in with as many outside sites as they can. These tentacles may be widgets, apps or iFrames - but its all the same strategy.

Basically all three announcements argue that instead of trying to build social networking into their services from scratch, Web sites should instead outsource their social graphs and "social features" such as user profiles, friends lists and media sharing from the large social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut.

This isn't a new pitch, Facebook has been singing the same song since they announced the beta of the Facebook Platform in August 2006 and Google has been sending Kevin Marks to every conference they can find to give his Social Cloud presentation which makes the same pitch. The new wrinkle to this time worn tale is that Google and Facebook [along with MySpace] are no longer just pitching using REST APIs for integration but are now preaching "no coding required" integration via widgets. 

Now that we know the meat of all three announcements we can go over the little specifics that have leaked out about each forthcoming product thus far.

Facebook Connect

Dave Morin gave the first official statement about Facebook Connect news in his blog post Announcing Facebook Connect where he wrote

Trusted Authentication
Users will be able to connect their Facebook account with any partner website using a trusted authentication method. Whether at login, or anywhere else a developer would like to add social context, the user will be able to authenticate and connect their account in a trusted environment. The user will have total control of the permissions granted.

Real Identity
Facebook users represent themselves with their real names and real identities. With Facebook Connect, users can bring their real identity information with them wherever they go on the Web, including: basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends, photos, events, groups, and more.

Friends Access
Users count on Facebook to stay connected to their friends and family. With Facebook Connect, users can take their friends with them wherever they go on the Web. Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites.

Dynamic Privacy
As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users' information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

The key features to note are (i) a user can associate their Facebook account with their account on a 3rd party site which means  (ii) the user's profile and media shared on Facebook can now be exposed on the 3rd party site and (iii) the users friends' on Facebook who have also associated their Facebook account with their account on the 3rd party site will show up as the user's friends on the site. 

The "dynamic privacy" claim seems pretty vague if not downright empty. All that is stated above is that the user's changes on Facebook are instantly reflected on 3rd party sites. Duh. Does that need to be called out as a feature?

Google Friend Connect

On the Google Friend Connect page there is the following video

The key features to note are (i) a user can associate their Facebook account OpenID with their account on a 3rd party site which means  (ii) the user's profile and media shared on Facebook account a small set of social networking site can now be exposed on the 3rd party site and (iii) the users friends' on Facebook the small set of social network sites who have also associated their Facebook account OpenID using Google Friend Connect to connect their account on the 3rd party site will show up as the user's friends on the site (iv) the user's activities on the 3rd party site are broadcast in her friends' news feeds.

One interesting thing about Google Friend Connect's use of OpenID is that it allows me to associate multiple social network profiles to a single account which may not even be from a social networking site (e.g. using my AOL or Y! email to sign-in but associating it with my Facebook profile & friend list).

Google Friend Connect seems to be powered by Google OpenSocial which is Google's attempt to commoditize the functionality of the Facebook platform by making it easy for any social networking site to roll its own Facebook-style platform by using Google's standard set of REST APIs, Javascript libraries and/or hosting services. In the above video, it is mentioned that Web sites which adopt Google Friend Connect will not only be able to obtain user profile and friend list widgets from Google but also OpenSocial widgets written by 3rd party developers. However since Facebook announced the JavaScript Client Library for Facebook API way back in January they already have the technology in place to offer something similar to Web site owners if this capability becomes in demand.  More important will be the set of functionality that comes "out of the box" so to speak since a developer community won't form until Google Friend Connect gains traction.

By the way, it turns out that Facebook has banned Google from interacting with their user data using Google Friend Connect since it violates their terms of service. My assumption is that the problem is Google Friend Connect works by building an OpenSocial wrapper on top of the Facebook API and then exposing it to other web sites as widgets and to OpenSocial gadget developers via APIs. Thus Google is pretty much proxying the Facebook social graph to other sites and developers which takes control of safeguarding/policing access to this user data out of Facebook's hands. Not good for Facebook. 

MySpace Data Availability

The only details on the Web about MySpace's Data Availability seems to be second hand data from tech bloggers who were either strategically leaked some details/screenshots or took part in a press release conference call. The best source I found was Mike Arrington's TechCrunch post entitled MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter which contains the following excerpt

MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth .

The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.

But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.

The key difference between MySpace's announcement and those of Facebook & Google is that MySpace has more ground to cover. Since Facebook & Google already have REST APIs that support a delegated authentication model, MySpace is pretty much playing catch up here.

In fact, on careful rereading it seems MySpace's announcement isn't like the others since the only concrete technology announced above is a REST API that uses a user-centric delegated authentication model which is something both Google and Facebook have had for years (see GData/OpenSocial and Facebook REST API).

Given my assumption that MySpace is not announcing anything new to the industry, the rest of this post will focus on Google Friend Connect and Facebook Connect.  

The Chicken & Egg Problem

When it comes to social networking, it is all about network effects. A social networking feature or site is only interesting to me if my friends are using it as well.

The argument that a site is better off using a user's social graph from a big social networking site like Facebook instead of building their own social network features only makes sense if (i) there is enough overlap in the user's friends list on Facebook and that on the site AND (ii) the user's friends on the site who are also his friends on Facebook can be discovered by the user. The latter is the tough part and one I haven't seen a good way of bridging without resorting to anti-patterns (i.e. pull the email addresses of all of the user's friends from Facebook and then cross-reference with the email addresses of the sites users). This anti-pattern works when you are getting the email addresses the user entered by hand from some Webmail address book (e.g. Hotmail, Gmail, Y! mail, etc).

However since Google and Facebook are going with a no-code solution, the only way to tell which of my Facebook friends also use the 3rd site is if they have also opted-in to linking their account on the site with their Facebook profile. This significantly weakens the network effects of the feature compared to the find your friends on your favorite "Web 2.0" site which a lot of sites have used to grow their user base by screen scraping Webmail address books then cross referencing it with their user databases.

How Does this Relate to Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability?

Short answer; it doesn't.

Long answer; the first thing to do is to make sure you understand what is meant by Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability. The difference between Data Portability and Social Network Interoperability is the difference between being able to export your email inbox and address book from Gmail into Outlook or vice versa (portable) and being able to send an email from a Gmail address to someone using Outlook or Hotmail (interoperable).

So do these new widget initiatives help portability? Nope. Widgets give developers less options for obtaining and interacting with the user data than APIs. With Facebook's REST API, I know how to get my friends list with profile data into Outlook and my Windows Mobile phone via OutSync. I would actually lose that functionality if it was only exposed via a widget. The one thing they do is lower the bar for integration by people who don't know how to code.

Well, how about interoperability? The idea of social network interoperability is that instead of being a bunch of walled gardens and data silos, social networking sites can talk to each other the same way email services and [some] IM services can talk to each other today. The "Use our data silo instead of building your own" pitch may reduce the number of data silos but it doesn't change the fact that the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world are still fundamentally data silos when it comes to the social graph. That is what we have to change. Instead we keep getting distracted along the way by shiny widgets.

PS: The blog hiatus is over. It was fun while it lasted. ;)

Now Playing: Fugees (Refugee Camp) - Killing Me Softly

An important aspect of the growth of a social software application is how well it takes advantage of network effects. Not only should users get value from using the application, they should also get value from the fact that other people use the software as well. Typical examples of technologies that require network effects to even be useful are fax machines and email. Having a fax machine or an email address is useless if no one else has one and they get more useful as more people you communicate with get one. Of course, the opposite is also true and the value of your product declines more rapidly once your user base starts to shrink.

The important balancing act for social is learning how to take as much advantage of the network effects of their application as possible yet make sure the application still provides value even without the presence of network effects. Three examples of Web applications that have done this well are Flickr, MySpace and YouTube. Even without social features, Flickr is a great photo hosting site. However its usage of tagging [which encourages discovery of similar pictures] and social networking [where you get to see your friends photo streams] allows the site to benefit from network effects. Even without a social networking component, MySpace works well as a way for people and corporate brands to represent themselves online in what I'd like to think of as "Geocities 2.0". The same goes for YouTube.

All three of these sites had to face the technology adoption curve and cross the chasm between early adopters & pragmatists/conservatives. One thing that makes social Web sites a lot different from other kinds of technology is that potential customers can not only cheaply try them out but can also can easily see the benefits that others are getting out of the site. This means that it is very important to figure out how to expose the pragmatists and conservative technology users to how much value early adopters are getting from your service. There are still only two ways of really getting this to happen "word of mouth" and explicit advertising. In a world full of "Web 2.0" sites competing for people's attention advertising is not only expensive but often ineffective. Thus word of mouth is king.

So now that we've agreed that word of mouth is important, the next thing to wonder about is how to build it into your product? The truth is that you not only have to create a great product, you also have to create passionate users. Kathy Sierra had two great charts on her site which I've included below

 

What is important isn't building out your checklist of features, it is making sure you have the right features with the right user experience for your audience.  Although that sounds obvious, I've lost count of the amount of churn I've seen in the industry as people react to some announcement by Google, Facebook, or some cool new startup without thinking about how it first into their user experience. When you are constantly adding features to your site without a cohesive vision as to how it all hangs together, your user experience will be crap. Which means you're unlikely to get users to the point where they love your product and are actively evangelizing it for free.

In addition to building a service that turns your users into evangelists, you want to acquire customers that would be effective evangelists especially if they naturally attract an audience.  For example, I realized MySpace was going to blow up like a rocket ship full of TNT when every time I went out clubbing the DJ would have the URL of their MySpace page in a prominent place on the stage. I felt similarly about Facebook whenever I heard college students enthusiastically  talking about using it as a cool place to hang out online with all their other college friends and alumni. What is interesting to note is how both sites grew from two naturally influential and highly connected demographics to become massively mainstream.

One thing to always remember is that Social Software isn't about features, it is about users. It isn't about one upping the competition in feature checklists it is about capturing the right audience then building an experience that those users can't help evangelizing.

Of course, you need to  ensure that when their friends do try out the service they are almost immediately impressed. That is easier said than done. For example, I heard a lot of hype about Xobni and finally got to try it out after hearing lots of enthusiastic evangelism from multiple people. After spending several minutes indexing my inbox I got an app that took up the space of the To-Do sidebar in Outlook with a sidebar full of mostly pointless trivia about my email correspondence. Unfortunately I'd rather know where and when my next meeting is occurring than that I've been on over 1000 emails with Mike Torres. So out went Xobni. Don't let the same happen to your application, as Kathy's graph above says "How soon your users can start kicking ass" directly correlates with how passionate they end up being about your application.

PS: Some people will include viral marketing as a third alternative to traditional advertising and word of mouth. I personally question the effectiveness of this technique which is why I didn't include it above.  

Now Playing: Fall Out Boy - I Slept With Someone In Fall Out Boy and All I Got Was This Stupid Song Written About Me