The Features all Great Facebook Applications Have in Common

My top goal for this trip to the Bay Area for Community Next and Graphing Social was to learn what makes a great Facebook application. What a question to try to answer in a long weekend!

The remarkable thing about all the information flying around this conference is that a lot of it is contradictory. Mike Sego of (fluff)Friends started out with a simple idea. But he purposefully avoided many of the “viral” elements of Facebook. His application spread entirely because people wanted to virtually “pet” one another’s virtual pets — which they could only do by adding the application. To invite friends to use (fluff)Friends, you actually have to pay “munny,” the virtual currency on which the application runs.

By contrast Blake Commagere of Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies started out with an application that — much to my chagrin — does nothing BUT allow users to invite their friends by “biting” them.

Meanwhile, Craig Ulliott of Where I’ve Been is busy talking about vertical integration of the entire travel space on Facebook into one application.

So far, I’ve been able to glean three main commonalities amid all these diverse approaches to application development:

1. Start simple. Develop a core functionality with a clean, intuitive interface and launch it quickly.
2. Listen to your user base and respond quickly. Make your users the core drivers of your product development initiatives.
3. Build something that gives users a means of interaction. If the application doesn’t exploit the connections between users — a.k.a. the “social graph” — it’s a non-starter.

What do you guys think? Did I miss anything?

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