

What multi-platform means for viral loops - amirnathoo
http://trigger.io/cross-platform-application-development-blog/2012/03/15/what-multi-platform-means-for-viral-loops/

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benrmatthews
How do you account for the success of Instagram, which has been iPhone only
for over a year?

Is it their API that has enabled web-based add ons? Or the simplicity of the
app and the ease of use?

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amirnathoo
If you click through any of these links:
<https://twitter.com/#!/search/instagr.am>

You'll be taken to a rich web experience that allows even non-iPhone users to
engage and in turn share with friends via Twitter.

So Instagram has done both the web and iPhone really well which has been
enough for them.

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jfoutz
The title lead me to believe this was an amazingly clever way for a phone and
pc to infect each other making it more challenging to remove viruses.

In a way, it kind of is, but not in the way i was expecting.

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mikeash
Interesting idea, but it seems to assume that a cross-platform strategy is
free. In reality, it's likely to consume a non-negligible amount of time. If
you can avoid that, then I'm sure it's a big gain, but if it delays your
initial release substantially, I'd wager that's at least as likely to harm
your potential "virality" as releasing earlier but on a single platform.

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blueski
A slight increase in "virality" can make the difference in the success/failure
of an app - surely worth a small increase in time. In reality, frameworks like
Trigger.io make it straightforward to access native functionality in a few
lines of Javascript and it's much quicker to iterate on a single codebase; so
(particularly) the ongoing time/cost should be less than native development.

