Andrew Laffoon’s Thoughts

Check them all out at: http://graphingsocial.com/videos/.

This is a great resource if you are looking to build a facebook app!

This is my first attempt at LiveBlogging a video of a conference session, so bear with me. This should be fun…

On the panel:

• Blake Commagere - Vampires, Causes
• Jason Beckerman
• Jia Shen - RockYou
• Tim O’Shaughnessy - Mardi Gras and seasonal apps

Justin is giving an overview of the platform. (1:40)

• 366 million apps installed in first 20 weeks (on pace for 1B in year 1)
• Shows incredible viral growth
• Metrics are changing: from total dist. to engagement
• Over 14 MM unique app users in August
• Users came 6-7 times on average, stayed for 5 minutes

History:

• Originally, no rules about invitations. Those who took advantage of that grew REALLY quickly and got acquired.
• Now there are a lot of rules - and a standardized interface that is mandatory.
• Now developers are targeting the invites.
• Invitation Incentives:
  • Blake: points
  • Jason: lotto
• Feeds:
  • very powerful - the main way to spread word about apps
  • How to optimize:
    • Story, Elements, Calls to Action
  • But we still don’t know the algorithm
• Notifications
  • Can send to friends or any app user
  • Can get blocked if too aggressive

Now the discussion is starting…

First question.

Blake:

• Blake was involved in optimizing invites. Ideas: auto-checking a given number of friends, check friends that convert better.
• What he focused on was AB testing - keep comparing and improving. Incentives are key, and AB testing brings great improvement.
• Notifications: never got around notifications. Uses them as a method to re-engage users. Does not help spreading to non-users.

Tim:

• Invite process - they were too late in the game to take advantage of this.
• Invite is the only method that requires active user approval. Many times the easiest decision is to hit skip!

Jia Shen:

• Invites are the only way to grow your app among non-users.
• RockYou’s focus has been two-prong:
  • For invites, make sure the selection process is easy. Incentives are different for different apps. It’s not really “inviting”. In Vampires, it is biting your friends. In Event-planning, it’s invite to an event. Etc.
    • Don’t just call it an invite -what is the incentive? What is the real use case? Get users engaged and wanting to have their friends involved.
    • Tuning can increase conversion by up to 30%
  • Mini-feeds - much more interesting for growing value of the app.
    • Great for putting together really useful info.
    • Same deal for notifications.
    • Changing graphics that correlate has a VERY big effect on clickthrough rate.
• Targeting Strategies:
  • Invite Side - who is likely to accept?
    • People who have declared a relationship (girlfriend, engaged, married, etc)
    • People who have between 3-20 wall posts
    • It just represents people who are core, active users of facebook - they actually use facebook and have real friends on it

Jason:

• Lotto - must send it to 10 friends when you add
• Added “Bonus Ticket” feature - every day you can invite 10 more friends and get a ticket to the weekly lotto
• Mini-feed - jackpot increasing every day

Next Question: Did Facebook’s changes make any major impact? (question not really answered)

• News Feed: Templating is REALLY exciting. Great for aggregating interesting information.
• Call to Actions are key!!! You have to design them to intrigue and engage users.

App Analytics:

• Blake: track application-specific metrics. Trying to measure engagement tactics. “I don’t do as much AB testing as I obviously should.” (bet I’ll hear that again)
• Jason
• Jia: do not over design an analytics system. We run real-time sql - batch it daily. Build a reporting system to view a graph. But raw numbers speak for themselves. The crux is this: make sure you are collecting everything!
• Tim: the raw numbers is the key.
• Blake: don’t overdevelop - Facebook is working on it!

Spam Ratings?

• Formula: # installed/engaged users, # notifications sent out, # marked as spam
• Think carefully about notifications - is it a real user action?
• In Vampires, the number of invitations is limited - helps with spam.
• Jia: RockYou does not use notifications at all. Notifications are just like email - a lot is spam - similar standards apply.
• Lots of tuning to make sure notifications are useful.

Question: If facebook turned on notifying non-users through news feed, how would it change invitation strategy?

• News feed is SO powerful. It is the page you see when you log in. It would totally change the game. (Blake)
• Jia: wouldn’t change much. Engagement drives installs - mini-feed events are designed to build engagement.
• Tim: also not much change. It is another, non-persistent form of invitation. Would need to be able to have two messages for an action - for users inside and out of the app.

Question: How far will the viral methods go to spread an application that is not inherently viral?

• Get your viral coefficient above one, and you take off. For things that are not inherently viral, the coefficient is just not going to get that high.
• The idea doesn’t have to be viral - it just has to provide value. The facebook tools can make value viral.

Question: Do you have insight into the rate of dropoff because of requirements to invite or add the app?

• Jason: no problem, add 7-10k per day, 500 who uninstall.
• Users are becoming much more savvy. Previous: users love to just click next. Now users hate being forced to invite. The invite makes sense, but forcing does not.
• Tim: After June 26, growth rates dropped dramatically - because of user invite cap.

Question: How bad would it be if for every app, Facebook reported the percentage of people who uninstalled it?

• Facebook does report it on the new stat page. (internally)
• Blake: Vampires has the highest uninstall rate among his apps (13%). (actually a good number, says Jia Shen) Not as bad as expected. Is it interesting to users? Most users would not understand it.

And that’s it!

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…

360Flex was an amazing conference!  I’ll be posting more on it soon.  Here are the blog posts I hope to write this weekend when I get a break:

• 360Flex Overview - why I think it rocked.  For now, check out the web site.

• Flex Code Jam - a great idea to build a free flex app for a cool non-profit.

• Flex Builder Secrets - an overview of the cool shortcuts in Flex Builder 2.  From a session at 360Flex by David Zuckerman.

Overall, it was an awesome conference and I was glad to be a part.  More coming soon…

I’ll be at 360Flex next week sporting the “Flex Your Muscles at Mixbook” T-Shirt. If you’re into Flex, I want to talk to you! Check out these great shots of our shirt.

Mixbook will be presenting in the Wednesday morning keynote at 360Flex, so get ready for our demo and invites for everyone to contribute to a book about the conference! Now all the attendees can contribute their photos and we can make a huge book about 360Flex. And we’ve got a special new feature that we just launched to show off…

If you’re going to be there, feel free to email me and we can schedule a time to meet up.

Mixbook of the Day, Volume 2! (Yes, I missed yesterday. Darn.) Pura Vida is a great book, and I’ve really enjoyed reading this one. I saw this one in progress for a long time while the author was making final tweaks, and I’m impressed by the final product. Check it out:

  View this book full size or get a printed copy at Mixbook

Aryk and I went to FlexCamp a little more than a week ago - it was an event for Flex Developers at Adobe’s Offices in San Francisco. We intended to go and meet developers and hear more about the next release, but two days before, we received an opportunity to present Mixbook during the keynote of the event with David Wadhwani (VP of Product Dev for Flex)! Needless to say, we were excited, and the presentation came out well. You can view it online!

At the event, we met lots of smart flex coders like Doug McCune and Matt Chotin. And we met a lot of new Flex developers wanting to learn about Flex - I love telling people about why we love Flex and Rails. We were also interviewed by the Adobe Developer Center (view the interview online).

Today I will start a new feature on my blog: Mixbook of the Day. Since I’m one of the founders of Mixbook, I get to see a lot of cool books, and I’ll share my daily favorites with all my millions of readers here (please note: I am never sarcastic). To kick it off, I’ll share one of my favorite books, authored by my wife and her sister:

Best of Bekah & Bo :: Recipes From Two Sisters, Vol. I

  View this book full size or get a printed copy at Mixbook

My wife is an excellent cook - she has made me some amazing dishes in our two years of married life! This is only the start of her cookbook-authoring career. If you like the recipes, feel free to buy a copy!