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SNAP Summit II
March 25, 2008
Commonwealth Club, SF, Calif., USA
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9:30
Effective Social Interface Design
Josh Porter; Founder, Bokardo: Social Web Design
Teaching us about del.icio.us, and digg.
10:00
PANEL: Methods of Boosting User Engagement
* MODERATOR: Dave McClure; Blogger, 500hats.com
* Rajat Paharia; CEO, Bunchball
* Siqi Chen; Co-Founder, Friends for Sale
* Naval Ravikant; Angel Investor, Developer of Compare People
* Jared Fliesler; Director of Business Development, Slide, inc.
What is user engagement?
Siqi: Users coming back everyday to use your application.
Jessica: Utmost importance. Engagement marketing. Capturing the attention of our users.
Rajat: More videos, more comments. Levels, leaderboards, points, trophies. the61.com.
Jared: Social entertainment company. Getting good content to the user.
User engagement is about communication. Between users and their network. For apps.
Siqi: Pragmatic tools. We look at three main metrics.
-Daily active users. How often does someone goto your app?
-Bounce rate. How many people come to your page and click around? How much activity?
-Over time. How long does it take someone to get tired of it? Why?
How do we monitize? Advertising and CPA offers. Track virtual currency and control for inflation.
What metric does your company user?
Jessica: Working on something internally now. A system that helps reward people for engagement. We allow people to block specific applications.\
Jared: It’s about the session time. What they’re doing, and looking at the depth of their experience.
Jessica: Virtual currencies have a lot of potential. Scrabulous isn’t the most innovative thing… it’s Scrabble. But it’s competition.
How do you get users back to your application?
Siqi: If someone gives you a gift or pokes, you we make a poke back link.
We create new connections. On regular Facebook, the only way you can interact is if you add them, or actually use our application. When you buy someone as a pet, they don’t have to be your friend. The only way to get back to that connection is through the application.
To get to our data, you have to come back to the application.
Jared: When look at apps that utilize gaming tactics, it makes sense in the short term. The challenge is keeping users coming back. For Slide, we haven’t really focused on a short term way of getting users back on the app. When you play Scrabulous, you are saying, “Hey, I’m smarter than you”.
Games involve your interaction, but fall off after user engagement. Slide uses content.
How do you use the mini-feed?
Jared: Top Friends Feed. Within any example, these interactions matter to users. These things add value.
Rajat: Anything you can measure, people optimze for.
Jared: Growth, depth, then revenue.
Siqi: Depth, growth. Then the money will come. 1/3 of our revenue is from the CPA stuff.
One tip for user engagement?
Jared: Making content available. Added an algorythym on Super Poke with three different email options based on what we think you are going to do, based on what the universe has done.
Rajat: Giving people missions to accomplish. More trophies. More Challenges.
Jessica: Whenever anything new is being designed, everything is max. Make it really easy. You can add a skin in one click. If it’s super simple to do more, people use it.
Siqi: Single button request form. One button is better than 20 with a bunch of checkboxes.
Audience: How do you use mobile to increase the engagement of the user? Is it a technical challenge?
Jessica: I hear it’s the year on mobile. lol. There are no applications that have done it well.
Jared: You have to choose the perfect message to send the user. The user could have just paid to recieve that message, and not liked it.
Audience: Sex a powerful motivator?
Siqi: If you wanna get rich make a porn site. If you wanna get really rich, make a site that will make people get laid in real life.
Mafia Facebook app. Two couples have gotten married from it. The odds of people getting laid for FFS are pretty good.
FFS is a stealth dating app. Hey, I’m not deperate, I’m just finding people. You meet, you find someone cute, and you can buy them. Lightweight interaction: it’s an excuse to start a conversaion/.
Different targeting for people that are single?
We do segment our userbase into two categories: creepy, non-creepy
Creepy: Older, have younger pets.
Non-creepy:
If creepy guy buys you, hey, I need to tell all my friends to buy me back. Dude, bid me up cuz I don’t want this guy to own me. Creepiness increases your values.
11:00
Metrics: Where Users Come From
Jia Shen; CTO and co-founder, RockYou
RockYou’s mission is to engage the world with social applications. Our growth by reach in terms of the amount of time it took us to get up to speed with Facebook and eBay is incredible.
We grew so fast because of the convergence of multiple mediums opening up (Facebook Platform, openSocial, Flash widget era) , and our viral marketing and metrics.
We are very mathematically inclined. We build extremely fast, and launch as soon as possible. Super Wall: one weekend.
After we launch, then iterate on the original design over and over again. Most importantly we let that guide most of our product decisions.
Viral channels should drive product concept and feature development. Have a plan to maximize the use of every viral channel. Viral loop: process by how you get new users. Once you have a product that has success, we listen to our user feedback through discussion boards, direct emails, and we try to accomodate their request as soon as possible.
How do you launch a winning application?
Coming up with a winning concept is half art and half science. A combination of psychology, analytics, and a little bit of guess work.
I’ve added you a top friend, do you wanna see my top friends?
-Simplicity
-Universal
-Social persuasion
-Novelty (art)
Novelty is the hardest component. When everybody else is building these applications, it’s very important to get yours out there before they get exposed to this type of application.
Nail down the viral loop. Timing is key. Don’t want competitors to carbon copy your app.
11:30
KEYNOTE: Jim Benedetto, MySpace
MySpace Developer platform
MySpace users have been using applications for years.
-YouTube
-PhotoBucket
-Slide
Users started embedding these objects on their profiles, even though we didn’t officially support it.
Existed because of core MySpace values:
-Minimal creative restrictions
-Encouraging self expression
-Maintaining high levels of customizability
OpenSocial APIs
-Javascript/HTML for embedded applications
-With MySpace-specific Extensions
REST APIs
-Enables server-server communication
-O-Auth lays the technical groundwork for data “availability” and “portability”
Actionscript APIs
-Flash support
Why OpenSocial
-Commitment to open standards. Openness helps everyone.
-Portability. Developers can spend more time building a great product rather than rebuilding it for every social network.
-Leverages existing web technologies. No need to learn proprietary development languages.
We want to have the ability to have a small spec that applies to everyone, but individuals should be able to customize it for their users.
Three primary surfaces that app developers can use on MySpace.
1.) Application gallery or profile
2.) Profile and canvas surface
3.) User home page surface – private, user-specific surface. Build information flows to the user that will only be viewed by the user.
Padlock
-Security: The protection of users from XSS, XSRF, activeX problems, malicious code, or accidental action.
-Privacy: Protecting a user’s data.
-Safety: Protecting individual users from other users
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Afternoon: The Business of Apps
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1:15
Mass Interpersonal Persuasion
BJ Fogg; Professor of Psychology, Stanford University.
Facebook is the most persuasive social technology ever.
Mass interpersonal persuasion. Wow, let’s teach this at Stanford.
Combines the power of interpersonal influence techniques with the reach of mass media.
Facebook is a Persuasive Technology
In 2007 the most effective persuasive technology has been Facebook. People in our lab have researched persuasive technology since 1993, and we’ve found the fastest path to insight is studying what’s working best in the real world. Today’s Facebook experience has so many elements of persuasion, so we’ve decided to dive in deep. Our goal is to understand the psychology of Facebook.
Winston Churchill used radio to rally support and change people’s attitudes. Orsen Wells was even more persuasive.
The simplest persuasive element is the best. eBay has the most lightweight model.
Automated structure. It brings people into a familiar environment. We humans are really lazy. It’s a lot easier to make an Obama Facebook group than it is to actually go rally.
The invite text on notifications actually has some persuasive psychology in it. Don’t leave persuasion to chance.
This has to happen at once if you want to control behavior:
-Sufficient motivation
-Sufficient ability
-Have to be triggered to accept that data
Social distribution inside a controlled environment. Facebook is a high-trust environment. If some scam is going on, it’s gonna be fixed soon.
Apps must have a social angle. Can’t rely on something so cool that they are gonna tell their friends. Credibility matters. Your app comes with some credibility automatically because it’s on Facebook.
You must affect a huge social graph. Play in the big sandbox with adoptive people.
Measured growth. You can see statistics in real time. Just put it out there and test it.
Facebook group: Psycology of Facebook
Peace Innovation: http://peace.stanford.edu
1:45
KEYNOTE: Future of the Social Platform
Dave Morin; Senior Platform Manager, Facebook
Unprecidented growth
Feb 2004 – Mark in his dormroom
Sept 2006 – Facebook opens to the world, News Feed
May 2007 – Facebook platform
November 2007 – Facebook Ads
2008 – Internationalization
67 million active users. (50% international)
20% of the entire population of Canada is on Facebook.
Evolution of the Platform
-Seamlessly integrates into the Facebook site.
-Mass distribution
-New opportunities
Since launch, we have 100 new apps being added every day. Worked with other sites to license our technology (FBML).
How do we enable commerce? How can you make money on your app? and beyond…
Creating long-term value
Frictionless platform
Easy for you to interact with the platform on all levels. How can we provide amazing value to our users? Gaining the user’s trust. We really want to help you as a developer to provide valuable information to users. Meaningful activity, how are users interacting?
Profile upgrade. It’s futuristic, man.
“We are adding this new concept called tabs”.
Leveraging social graph.
The network of connections that exist in the world through which we interact. There is only one social graph in the world. We are trying to map it.
As technology has gotten better, it’s been easier for more people to communicate at the same time. The internet democratizes this. As we try to map out the social graph, more people can communicate with more people at the same time. This basically enables all of us to have better relationships with each other.
Causes. Today, it’s easy for anyone to say, “I really care about breast cancer”. As my friends see it, they can also support these causes and the social graph just gets bigger.
World-class application
Increase utility and functionality. We need more sports applications. Imagine a Facebook app that integrates into your workflow. Imagine better religion apps.
We are providing more commerce functionality.
Maximize the user experience.
Respect the ecosystem. “You must invite 15 friends in order to view your results”
Design with the user in mind.
What’s next?
-Long-term value to developers and businesses.
-Sharing proven technology, tools, and architecture
-Enabling viral…
We work directly with Bebo to help license our platform.
fbFund
-Lower barrier to entry for building a business
-$10million program funded by Accel and The Founders Fund
-Non-dilutive grants
Average amount of money given for fbFund?
Between $25k and $250k
Average grant: $200k
Taking advantages of our intrastructure
-Joyent
-Amazon S3
-Microsoft Popfly
User driven internationalization efforts with a mass distribution.
Future of Platform?
30,000 apps. 300,000 developers.
Get data off of Facebook? *hint*
What about openSocial?
We are always looking for new and interesting ways to provide wealth to our users. We have 300,000 developers. We have committed to data portability. Every time we launch a new feature, it’s as open as possible.
If openSocial becomes something that is as interesting, we will work with them as well.
2:30
PANEL: Social App Exit Strategies
* MODERATOR: Jim Scheinman; EIR, CRV, former VP of Bebo
* Lee Lorenzen; CEO, Altura Ventures
* Jeremy Liew; Partner, Light Speed Ventures
* Jeff Clavier; Angel Investor
* Seth Goldstein; CEO and co-founder, Social Media
Did not attend
3:45
PANEL: Building What Users (and Advertisers) Want
* MODERATOR: Aaron Kahlow; Managing Partner, BusinessOnline
* Steve Jang; CMO and Head of Biz Dev, imeem
* Jeremiah Owyang; Web Analyst, Forrester
* Kevin Barenblat; Co-founder and CEO, Context Optional, Inc.
* Martin Green; Head of Biz Dev, Meebo
* Anu Shukla; CEO and Founder, Offerpal Media
Did not attend
