We’re moving into an age where habits matter more than virality… If you can’t retain users, if you can’t engage users, growth is not enough.
Even without the viral potential you can still get big slow … through engagement and retention and habits.
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Adding user registrations at such a fast pace doesn’t leave enough time for a dedicated, engaged user community to organically create itself and establish norms […]
the worst thing a start-up social network can do is to buy advertising to attract users. Growth should happen because users find value in a site, and then get their friends to join […]
And if users don’t come? Start-ups should try harder to make a better product.— Caterina Fake: Fast Growth for a New Social App Is a Very Bad Thing
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Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. […]
This proves the power of the interest graph, and could convince more startups to build around what people care about instead of the social graph of who they care about.
— Pinterest Hits 10 Million Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever
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Initially the “Popular” page was the key. It was filled with people […] it was the place to find out that you could follow anyone from around the world. Even if you didn’t have a friend on the service, you could find someone to follow on this page.
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Product Virality borrows ideas from epidemiology which studies the spread of diseases in populations. A commonly used model in epidemiology is the Compartment model which models populations as they move from one stage (or compartment) to the next.
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The fact that you’re not trying to maximize your audience creates a fundamental distribution problem for Path and any other micronetwork that pops up. How will the mainstream ever find out about Path or think it’s work their time if they’re not bombarded with invites? This may unfortunately be why micronetworks won’t succeed as standalone products, and may need to live within your general social network service of choice.
— Friend Count Up, Sharing Down: Path Only Works If You Reject Those Friend Requests
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The media environment that Luther had shown himself so adept at managing had much in common with today’s online ecosystem of blogs, social networks and discussion threads. It was a decentralised system whose participants took care of distribution, deciding collectively which messages to amplify through sharing and recommendation. Modern media theorists refer to participants in such systems as a “networked public”, rather than an “audience”, since they do more than just consume information. Luther would pass the text of a new pamphlet to a friendly printer (no money changed hands) and then wait for it to ripple through the network of printing centres across Germany.
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Virality principle 3: Be useful even with no other users
