Dr. BJ Fogg and Dave McClure taught a class last semester at Stanford on Building Facebook Applications. In 10 weeks, the 80 students had created 50+ applications and in total had over 20 Million installs – with 5 having more than 1 million users. At today’s Graphing Social Patterns conference, BJ and his two teacher assistants shared 10 tips they learned from the experience. Here they are:
- It’s never too late to create a winning app
- Simplicity & clarity are key to app success
- Aim for speed & flexibility in launch and iterations
- Community cooperation leads to success (in other words, the most successful students shared the most)
- Individual opinion about apps are worthless, you need to get out there and see what happens
- Copying success is a cheap / fast way to succeed
- Metrics do matter, but today’s tools are too weak
- You CAN learn to create a winning app
- Success comes from the CHAOS / CONTROL Cycle
- Mass Interpersonal Persuasion is finally here
We would love to hear any other tips, from those of you who have created your own Facebook apps. Please leave a comment below.
