Andrew Laffoon’s Thoughts

Well whaddaya know, my awesome cofounder went and joined RubyAMF to make the fastest Flash Remoting gateway for Rails around.  Over the past weekend, he and Aaron Smith rewrote 60% of the codebase and found HUGE gains in speed and smaller filesizes.  Aryk did most of the coding himself over the weekend (pretty much non-stop), and Aaron joined him at the Mixbook offices on Sunday afternoon to integrate their work and do a “heavy metal code jam” - coding while rockin out to heavy metal!  Read all about it on the RubyAMF Blog:

RubyAMF - Skipping 1.3.4 and Writing 1.3.5

You can now view a random Mixbook using the new random Mixbook widget! Use the “Get this” button to automatically embed it wherever you want!!

Andrew Chen has a great post analyzing the viral loop of Yahoo! Mash. This is a good example of how to think about the viral loop of an application. He says that Yahoo! Mash’s viral loop is:

1. Getting an invite that a friend set up a profile for him.
2. Going through the addressbook importer screen
3. Agreeing to accept/reject Randy’s changes
4. Setting up my profile, etc.
5. Putting a friend’s e-mail into the invite form
6. Then my friend gets an e-mail (with notice that I set it up for him)

So, it’s a 6 step viral loop. I agree with Andrew’s point that not being able to automatically invite from your address book is definitely going to hurt the viral loop. It looks like they are going for quality over quantity, but there is a lot of evidence that quantity can lead to massive growth.

When thinking about growing a site, the viral loop is a key component to consider.  I’ll have to see how this applies to Mixbook…