Now There’s a Course I’d Like to Take
This is from a Fast Company interview with BJ Fogg, Stanford University professor, who is writing a book on the impact of Facebook:
You recently taught a course at Stanford where you had your students create Facebook apps that turned out to be very popular. How’d you manage that?
Within 10 weeks, they got 16 million people who installed their apps. The week of the final, they had collectively over one million users a day. We talked about psychology, metrics, and this feedback loop between users and creators. We really wanted to tune the students into listening to users. Pay attention to the comments about your apps, watch the numbers, try things, look at other examples and imitate them, think about the psychology, tap into motivation and persuasion, make your best guesses and see what happens.
It’s a very interesting interview. He believes Facebook is enormously important to the way we interact, the biggest thing since radio. Here’s the link again: Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think | Fast Company
- Tim Berry
Palo Alto Software
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Tim,
Thanks for covering the Fast Company article.
Actually, I do think the asset that Facebook has is more valuable even than Google’s search asset. What Facebook has in its social connectedness is stickier. You may be able to get people to switch search engines, but switching somebody out of their entire social networking world is a lot harder. Facebook just hasn’t figured out how to monetize that yet.
There’s more about this in my article about mass interpersonal persuasion: http://www.bjfogg.com/mip.pdf
BJ Fogg
Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab