

What makes Quora, Hashable, Plancast and the likes viral social apps? - lolizbak
http://laurentk.posterous.com/in-search-of-the-perfect-viral-social-app

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Hoff
This (also) parallels online games and gaming and gambling; of activities that
can be addictive.

If anything, social apps are games where your users provide the incremental
AIs in the game in the form of inviting and engaging and luring other users
into the app. This via invites, ecards, data import functions and whatever you
can do to get existing users to entice new users into your app.

Learn too from the casinos and particularly the video-gaming gambling folks,
and how they keep the engagement going with sounds and noises and colors and
videos.

Learn from the multi-level marketing folks and from the secret societies, too.
This via opening new levels or vendor coupons (from advertisers) or granting
complimentary status levels and icons, this based on data imports or size of
the network of contacts or whatever. And, of course, a way to buy this status
is available, too.

Know too what your target demographic really wants. Gossip? Chats? Shiny? A
source of information on new technology and on startups? Find it, feed it, and
particularly work to get your clients to provide what your demographic wants.

And with games such as Farmville within social sites, we go full circle.

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huertanix
I have yet to meet a single person outside SF who uses Plancast more than once
a month (from the five outside SF I know who use it at all). Not sure if I'd
call it viral so much as quarantined.

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lolizbak
Ok, two things : 1) i was looking at the viral/social features (graph
integration, actions as "count me in", graph discovery, sharing features, ...
2) it's surprisingly taking off in europe, but with tech savvy early adopters,
true.

