Joyent

Top 3 Keys to Viral Apps on Facebook

We see thousands of Facebook applications. Over 4,000 developers run their Facebook apps on Joyent Facebook Accelerators. We have seen people grow from 10 users to 10,000,000. And, we have seen great apps go nowhere.

Tonight, I was talking with SocialMedia’s Nick Gonzalez. Nick said that the Facebook app space is a microcosm of the web. He’s right. A radically sped up microcosm. From a position like Joyent’s, we get to see the whole ecosystem evolve in a way that is like watching a film from a stop motion camera.

And from this perspective, we can see the keys to Virality. Here they are in order:

#1 Your application must load fast

Virality is very tenuous. If someone invites you to an app, and when you check it out, it loads slowly, or doesn’t load at all, you give up and, more than likely, you will never check it again.

Look through the facebook app directory, you will see beautiful, well designed, rich applications fail to go viral because they have not solved this speed problem.

This doesn’t mean the whole app has to be super fast. But the first page had better be.

Technically, this means using every trick in the book to help make the page load quickly. Start by writing code that generates the front page as a highly static html file. Update that file every few minutes if you need to. Then use something like Nginx, for example, to kick out these small html files lightning fast. Making smart use of hardware load balancers means requests for more dynamic pages can to sent to different ports with different services, such as Apache or Mongrel.

Joyent can help you with some of the speed issues. We can arm you with more Accelerators at the app layer and bigger Accelerators at the DB layer. Our hardware load balancers help tremendously, as does the fact that our data center is peered with Facebook’s. But, none of that can fully make up for an application design and a deployment architecture that is not geared towards speed. If you run everything through one app server and dynamically generate each front page, your application is going to be slower than it could be otherwise. Thinking about designing for speed right from the beginning will help tremendously.

#2 People like showing off

This is a less technical point, but it reflects what we have been seeing. People like to show off. Apps that call for user created content are often more viral. If you generate content by posting a photo, a sticker or even fill out a personal survey, you are more likely to invite your friends to the application so you can show off what you have created.

#3 Start Simple, Add Complexity

Apps that require only the simplest initial user participation tend to be more viral. This is similar to the first criteria in that it relates to speed. But here, instead of speedy page load time, the focus is on user understanding.

Your first page has to be understood instantly. If your app’s objective can be described in only its name, or just one sentence, you are golden.

A Great Example: Where I’ve Been

Where I’ve Been is a great example. The name says it all. You know what the application is as soon as you seen the invite from a friend. The app requires users to create a map showing all the countries they have visited. That gives you something to show off, which in turn motivates you to invite friends to the application. And finally, the team that has created it has put together an application that is super fast.

30% Plan to add Facebook as Marketing Channel

We recently sent out a survey to all Joyent users.

One of the questions we asked was “What are your plans to leverage Joyent’s peering with Facebook ?”

30% of respondents answered “We are not yet driving traffic through a Facebook app, but plan to in the future”.

Joyent Players' Club

Today at the Facebook Developer Garage in Austin, TX (one of the side events at the South by Southwest Interactive conference) we introduced Joyent’s Players’ Club.

Players’ Club allows developers on social networking platforms the ability to scale very large without having to spend any money with Joyent. Joyent’s Players’ Club is by invitation only. If you have an application running on a social networking site, please feel free to contact playersclub [at] joyent [dot] com to see if you qualify.

Go B.I.G. now: Spring Sale on Accelerators

We announced this special by email to all Joyent customers. So if you’re still teetering over your choice, let this be your sign :)

We’ve heard your requests loud and clear and have opened up the same great savings to you that initially launched only for Facebook developers.

Act now and get:
Two years for the price of one year * or five years for the price of two years *(60% savings) on every single Joyent Accelerator product!

Got an app that’s taking off and need that extra muscle to scale up? As always, Joyent has your back.

The Joyent compute cloud will make you a rock star in your organization and with your users.

Witness one Joyent customer doing 700MM page views with multiple Accelerators supporting a Rails app! -you’ll find out who soon enough ;)

So, upgrade your server to a roomy new Accelerator today and save a load of cash!, but hurry, we can only keep this going so long before our CFO discovers our plot and shuts this deal down!

Click here to get started now.

Need to scale up to support 1,000,000 page views or more. Joyent offers you clear and unmatched advantages:

• Joyent’s compute cloud provides a highly scalable on-demand infrastructure for running Web sites, including rich Web applications written in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python and Java.
• Joyent Accelerators are built on OpenSolaris, multi-core (8+), RAM-rich servers (32GB+ each) and vast amounts of storage.
• Joyent Accelerators are deployed in the best routing and switching fabric (Force 10) and the best load-balancers (F5 Networks) available.

• Joyent Accelerators are next-generation virtual computers that can grow and multiply (or shrink and consolidate) – that means you’re not locked into inflexible contracts.

Convinced? Sign up is fast.

Still need some more details? Shoot us an email at support@joyent.com to set up a consultation

…or be bold and call one of our Accelerator gurus direct at +1.415.874.5504.

UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THIS PROMOTION ENDED ON MARCH 31, 2008.

20%-50% off Joyent Accelerator Upgrades (for Facebook Developers)

If you have an existing free Facebook Accelerator account, you should have received this promotion via email today. For the rest of you, we’ve got a great deal to offer.

Today, over 14% of application usage at Facebook comes from applications that run on Joyent Accelerators, and it is great to watch the successes many of you have had on this platform.

To support your continued growth, we have come up with special pricing to help you scale:

• 20% off 1GB, 2GB or 4GB Accelerators if you buy on a quarterly basis.

• 50% off 1GB, 2GB or 4GB Accelerator if you buy 1 year as you will get the 2nd year for free.

On both offers, we’ll also waive the set up fees for people upgrading from Joyent Facebook Accelerators.

You can get these deals on the special order page. This pricing is available for a limited time only.

Also, we’ve increased your bandwidth to 10TB!!

Joyent now gives you your first 10,000 GiB (10TB) of data transfer AND traffic between your Joyent Accelerator and Facebook, does not count towards the 10TB – an even sweeter deal no one can match!

On Amazon, that would cost you just about $1,800. After the first 10TB, your charges will be a mere $0.15 per GB. Not a bad deal we think.

Don’t wait, Upgrade Today!

UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THIS PROMOTION ENDED ON MARCH 31, 2008.