Successful social media apps use “baby step development”
The two most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about developing a Facebook app are probably:
- Viral ideas are like half-cooked spaghetti; some of the stick to the wall, but you have to throw a bunch of noodles to find out which
- Launch you app before it’s “finished,” and develop it over time as new features occur to you
I call this strategy of developing apps over time “baby step development,” because it relies significantly on incrementalism, or taking baby steps with your product.
Why is this important in social media?
Because what you’re looking for is engagement. Facebook highlighted this when they introduced the idea of “daily active users” for an app, instead of just counting the number of people who have installed an app.
And what better way to keep people coming back to your app than to keep adding new features and responding to user requests?
From that standpoint, it’s important that you look at any Facebook or OpenSocial app spec as something to provide a trajectory, not just a product.
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“Release early, release often” was a credo of the open-source community long before Facebook existed. And “perpetual beta” is a staple of many popular services.
There’s a difference between “half-cooked spaghetti” and half-cocked spaghetti-code though. Generally you only get one, maybe two shots to make a favorable impression on a new user, and no chance to win back an existing user who has been turned off. So while an active evolution and responsiveness to users are powerful, it’s important to be in a usable state pretty much at all times and to roll out enhancements gracefully. In terms of effort required, my experience (general product+service dev background) is that doing so can be easier, but it requires a good deal of discipline.
@jope you’re absolutely right that having something that *works* out of the box is supremely important.
In the early days of Facebook apps, many good ideas got nuked by overloaded servers that crashed all the time. Users got frustrated and deleted the apps that were never online.
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