An open world: Spread Virally

I'm here at the Google IO conference, and have just listened to the open social section of the first keynote. One of the interesting things that I found about Open Social is that once a company has deployed their app on a social network, the app is going to spread with about the rate of a virus. Applications on a social network that are picked up by a lot of individual users off of an enormous select applications screen are no good; a social network applications need to be adopted by one's friends. Of course, app developers are not going to hope that friends either hear about their app by word of mouth or another way, apps on a social network are able to send notifications and "invitations" to join the app and share things with your friends. Once a friend sends a notification to another friend, they can either choose to accept it and move on without using the application, or use the application and "pass it on", or send similar notifications to their friends. This provides the "web" diagram commonly linked to social networking. And this spread model is about the same as a virus.

For example, if you assume that each user sends notifications to all of his or her friends, but only three friends really adopt this new app. (Yeah, small number.)if each of those three friends has three more friends that adopt it, there are fourteen people using the app so far. And the number only gets larger. One more iteration and you have fourty-one users, and one more and you have 122. This is the viral spread of social apps; it forms an exponential curve. And, of course, the numbers only get larger. Social apps are not just each person finding and discovering on their own; they are people finding and discovering, and then passing it on. The heavy integration provided by APIs such as OpenSocial are just vessels to get people to let the apps access a contacts list when they send out notifications, and to position them in a place where they are going to be talked about, and thus spread.