Social Media Business School - this Friday in London!

I've been asked to be on the panel for a conference this Friday in London, the SocialMedia Business School, organised by SocialMedia Networks. They have a line up of very good speakers, with panelists from Developer Analytics, WE7, Fidelity Ventures, Partygaming and BuzzTone, among others - as well as of course their own guys (and me). 

The blurb:

The purpose of the SocialMedia Business School session is to bring together industry experts to help guide you in building out your applications’ revenue model and preparing your business plan for financing and general planning. SocialMedia Networks, the social advertising network will bring together advertisers, leading developers and analytics gurus to help you build your business. You will learn about the resources available to you to make the most money from your applications, and using supporting materials provided by SocialMedia you’ll apply what you learn into an actual business plan that turns your apps into a sustainable business.

I'll be on the marketing panel, discussing seeding and marketing of applications. Hope to see you there!

Price and Value - Why Virtual Items Work

"I got a phone call one day from a friend who had recently opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even told her sales staff to "push" the items hard - again without success.

Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled as exasperated note to her head saleswoman, "Everything in this display case, price x 1/2", hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been old. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because the employee had read the "1/2" in her scrawled message as a "2", the entire allotment had sold at twice the original price!"

This is an extract from Influence, Science and Practice, by Robert B. Cialdini, showing how people equate value with price. Over the past couple of years a 'virtual item' economy has been cropping up - from Facebook's digital gifts, Habbo Hotel's virtual items, and Second Life's user-created economy. However, when I've mentioned some of the estimated figures and real money being spent on these to clients, many of them are incredulous - why would people spend money on a 'fake' gift??

The truth is, as human beings we equate price and cost with value. We have the general assumption that if something costs more, then it is worth more, and although this may seem shortsighted, it's actually an extremely valuable tool. If I wanted to buy a diamond, how would I know the different values? I have the choice of a) learning everything about diamonds so that I am able to personally value them b) paying an independent expert to accompany me shopping or c) going by price. 

Now, diamonds are pretty, but I know I haven't got the time or inclination to learn everything about them, and paying an expert to accompany me shopping just seems a bit... over the top. Of course diamonds are only one product, but the same applies across the board. We have trained ourselves to use these kind of short cuts in many areas of life - rules of thumb. They help us operate in an extraordinarily complex world. 

The same thing applies to virtual items and gifts - as soon as you put a price on them, that effectively becomes their value. As long as a buyer can't get the same gift for free next door, then the item has that real world value. This can carry over into gifts as well - if I receive a gift that I know is worth £1, then the value of that gift is £1, plus the value of having someone who cares about me enough to actually buy the gift and give it to me. 

Although they don't release any figures, the recent move by Facebook to remove the 'gift of the day' from the homepage suggests that this is become a less meaningful revenue source - not a surprise when you consider that it's so easy to send free gifts to each other on Facebook with different applications. This is a problem for any business strategy revolved around selling virtual items - you need to ensure that someone else can't come in and undercut you with the same features. This has been a problem for Facebook because their gifts were essentially extremely simple 2d graphics. It hasn't been so much of an issue in the Second Life economy because building new items is complicated and requires significant knowledge, and isn't an issue at all in Habbo Hotel where they hold a monopoly over creating and selling items. 

So, selling virtual items can work - but only if a virtual scarcity is created. If you can create this, either through the complicated nature of the virtual item or by holding a virtual monopoly, it can be a very effective business strategy.

Facebook Developer Garage, 5th March - "Growing Up"

Last night I went along to the London Facebook Developer Garage, hosted by Sun Microsystems. I help to organise these through the garage committee. Last night was about "apps Growing Up, how we use them in business, how applications compete against each other and how they're coping with the real world of copyright".

The event was pretty packed, as normal, and amazing almost everyone managed to turn up at exactly the same time, so there was a huge queue to register. After everyone had arrived we cracked open the beers, and the pizzas (loads and loads of them) were delivered from Dominos).

Once we'd all had our fill we settled down. Had a quick introduction from Toby Beresford, who is the primary organiser of the garages here. He played us the "Facebook Anthem", a UK made song about being bored of Facebook and annoyed especially with applications. We then had to turn to the person next to us to ask what they thought about the future of applications (this discussion was continued into the pub after). 

Alexey Gabsatarov took a look at some of the top applications, stating that 90% of the top 200 apps have no utility or rational appeal, and appeal to our emotional make up, or as he described it: "apps a caveman would like". He suggested that our basic emotions are hardwired and have remained the same since caveman times, and so groups applications in this fashion:

The Self (personality tests etc)

The Family (kissing/hugging/personal relationships)

The Tribe (Friend lists, top friends etc)

The Chief (Compare/Compete with friends)

It was an interesting talk, although it does mainly apply to the 'emotional' applications with little rational utility, which I believe will decrease in predominance as more engaging and useful applications grow, boosted by the crack down on spammy applications which have fueled the growth of many of these simple apps. 

Next up, Andy McLoughlin from Huddle.net and Tom Woolway from Techlightenment took the stage to discuss the Huddle Workspaces application, which allows you to have secure spaces to store files and work notes, whether for personal or work. Huddle have a 'freemium' business model, allowing full functionality to free users, with additional storage for payment, and large scale serviced enterprise clients. They admitted that they designed the application mainly as a marketing tool to get users to sign up to the main service, and so didn't include complete functionality, although stressed that users within Facebook still had more than enough functionality to make use of the application without ever leaving, and the PHP facebook application works off the primary (ASP.NET) application using a mixture of APIs with SOAP, so that Facebook users could work alongside users from the main website, and could interchange between using Facebook and the main site with the same account (although to use the main site with the extra features you have to register, with your email address). 

I asked why they couldn't of given full functionality within the application, and why they thought that users were more valuable on their main site. They responded honestly that they wanted users email addresses to be able to try and upsell, rather than doing that through the application itself which may put off users. This is valid, although it is possible to send emails directly to users of apps through Facebook. It would also of been possible to ask users to register with their email inside the app to get access to more functions. What do you think?

David Parfect, from the new Facebook London office, came up to show us the polling system on Facebook. Relevant to our initial discussion, he asked "Apps on Facebook are useful for...", and bought 500 responses at $1 each, which is the fastest way (the votes started coming in real time). I jotted down the responses, but don't have the screen shots, so the wording of the answers may be slightly inaccurate:

1. Interacting with friends: 9%

2. Showing your emotions: 2%

3. Making your day go quicker: 15%

4. Irritating friends: 20%

5. Nothing: 54%

The responders were roughly split between male/female, with most from the 18-24 age range. Hmm... not a great response for application developers! Nevertheless, I believe this reflects the general fatigue of all the crappy, spammy apps that have pervaded Facebook for too long, and which I believe will die out over the course of the next six months, to be replaced by engaging, relevant applications. 

We had a great talk on copyright issues, with a particular look at Scrabulous, from Vanessa Barnett, BLP Law. This was really fun, and had a long digression into the legality of showing photos of Banksy work (it's still artwork, and thus copyright, even though many of it is also illegal graffiti). 

Matt Clayton, from Wakari, gave another excellent talk. He was hired by Sony to build an application to promote the new Rambo movie here in the UK, however at the same time another company was briefed to do almost exactly the same application to promote it in the US (duh). The US version was called Get Rambo, the UK one Become Rambo. In summary, Get Rambo tanked, whilst Become Rambo did amazingly well. Why? Well, that made up most of the talk!

There were a couple of key reasons. First, here in the UK they'd been promoting a Rambo facebook page, and by the time the app launched they had a few thousand fans who all installed the app and provided the first boost. This meant that when they started advertising the app (ad spend unknown) people saw activity and usage, a big difference. Also, instead of a simple attacking option which Get Rambo used, Become Rambo included a 'gameplay' element, with points and rankings, and different weapons which unlocked as you got more ranking points, as well as options to defend or retaliate. When you got to 100 points you 'became Rambo', and they had a secret status at 300 points. Matt said that there were users with over 2000 points still battling it out. Over 5 weeks, the length of the campaign, they got over 50,000 users with 6-7k daily active users.

They worked really hard on the page flow to keep users coming back, and added loads of viral functionality, with a really high conversion rate. The application itself is beatifully designed, combining the Rambo style with Facebook design features. Matt also talked about the huge importance of constant testing, saying that tiny tweaks made huge differences to invites and conversion levels. 

After the event, I went to the pub round the corner with Toby, Matt and Mike Butcher from TechcrunchUK. Around a few drinks we had some great discussions on the future of applications. Anyone following my tweets through the event would of heard that during his talk, Matt said that being reported in Techcrunch had no effect on user levels and was a waste of time for application developers trying to get users - not realising Mike was standing in the door. Of course, Techcrunch is primarily a business publication, so it was unlikely to make a difference - and Mike and Matt were getting on just fine in the pub after, so no hard feelings!

Facebook, the Friendfeed Killer.

Last month, Friendfeed launched publicly with the announcement that they had $5m of funding. They're a social aggregator, feeding in stories from your different social tools, e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Delicious etc. However, they have the added ability for comments and discussions to be started about any of the individual posts. 

It had a lot of fanfare and created dedicated fans among the blogosphere because of the value of some of the conversations taking place. 

However, as Techrunch reported a couple of weeks ago, Facebook are opening up their newsfeed to allow external sites (such as Twitter, Flickr and Delicious) access, essentially making it the same service as Friendfeed, with the added value that not only are all your friends already on Facebook, but also that Facebook have developed an advanced algorithm for picking and choosing stories to ensure they're relevant to you, rather than delivering everything in the newsfeed - and you can still get everything from a person in their mini-feed if you want.

Of course, Facebook hasn't announced that they're adding comments into this... but, wait a minute - they have announced a new profile layout, with a single big page which combines the wall and the mini-feed into one, big feed: put them together and you're going to be able to comment directly after stories coming in on your friends mini-feed. Of course, this isn't quite as advanced as Friendfeed, but then the new profile page isn't fully confirmed yet, and they could well go the whole hog.

If they do, this would certainly make the existence of friend feed almost entirely pointless for most Facebook users. What do you think?

The Future of Applications: Branded Engagement and Communities

Recently, Forrester released 'The Connected Agency', in which Peter Kim and Mary Beth Kemp discuss how marketing agencies will change over the next five keys to become community facilitators, acting as the gateway between brands and opt-in interest groups.

This came at a very interesting time for us at iNetwork - within a couple of days from reading the report, we had two clients who wanted almost exactly that - they wanted us to help them build specific interest communities in order to allow selective access to them from relevant brands. More and more, our view of all applications and social media technologies is moving from conversations to communities (at a time when many people are still making the move from statements to conversations):

Statements -----> Conversations -----> Communities

I decided to write this post because despite the great things being written all over the blogosphere about the nature of social network applications, there still seems to be some confusion between old and new media. This has been shown very strongly in the continuing search for CPM in social networks and applications, and the amazed headlines when monetisation doesn't seem to be working that well.

I hate to say this, but MONETISING SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ABOUT GETTING USERS TO CLICK ON ADS. I seriously believe that companies like RockYou, Slide etc are going to realise that they cannot effectively make money by trying to create applications which have the sole aim of getting users to click somewhere else. I'd bet that they've made the most money where they've offered brands the opportunity to access their 'communities' of users in a meaningful way (e.g. Sony branding up the vampires application for a vampire movie).

Users have been getting sick of gimmicky applications, and so have platforms - note the huge crackdown on application spam by Facebook over the last month. Over the next year, I believe that we're going to see a huge step-change in the industry, and a big move to engaging, community based applications either branded specifically, or giving access to a number of brands. In Shaking the Money Tree of Multi Platform Social Networks, Jia Shen noted that the ratio of success for applications of social networking platforms is higher than for stand-alone platforms. Add that to the easy install and integration with the social graph, and it's clear why applications will continue to be a brilliant platform for engaging with users and interest based communities.

I plan to write more on this, as it's an important topic. 'Adverts' will not go away, and are still relevant when people are searching for information (which can include when they are browsing news sites) - as long as it's relevant. I'd recommend you read the Forrester report, and think about how this can practically apply to your social marketing activities today - not just in 5 years time.

Using Twitter as an Enterprise Tool: Interview with Mukund Mohan

Mukund Mohan is a serial entrepreneur who has gone through a number of successful exits, and is the founder of Best Engaging Communities, a popular blog on business communities and social media. I interviewed him yesterday on how he's used Twitter as an enterprise tool to facilitate a dispersed workforce. The following is a summary of our conversation.

Tell me a bit about the project that you were working on when you decided to use Twitter

We were working on a social media project for just over 9 months, which was eventually sold to Innovis. Because the company had grown through acquisition, we had a very dispersed team, with 46 people spread over 7 US cities, and a small team in London (UK). We needed to keep everyone engaged and in the loop. Initially we were using instant messaging and email to keep in touch, however this was inefficient and created a number of issues: IM was good when the person you needed to speak to was online at their computer, but when this wasn't the case it wasn't very useful, and there was no central record of the discussions that had taken place. Email was being used for more important announcements but with 46 people this resulted in a lot of clutter. Email is also what I call an 'open box' - anyone can send you messages, regardless of whether you want to hear from them or not, which can result in spam and other unwanted or unnecessary emails.

Why did you decide to use Twitter?

I've always been a big fan of Twitter personally, and it solved a lot of these issues. We set up secure accounts for everyone and ensured we were all following each other. This allowed us to have a single, always on discussion, allowing everyone in the company to stay in touch wherever they were, and whatever platform they were using - computer, IM, mobile, etc. We used it for two main functions: status updates, to let each other know where we were (both physically and with regards to projects), and for asking questions, requesting files etc. Someone could post a question at any time, and although there wouldn't always be all 46 of us online, at least a few would, and if they couldn't answer the question either they could pass it on, or when someone came online later they could check through the conversation and help then.

Was there a downside to using Twitter?

Some people felt that it was 'yet another distraction' and that it had the possibility of lowering productivity, especially if you're following or getting involved in conversations that aren't entirely relevant to what you're doing. However, this is less of the case than with IM, as with IM people expect instant responses, but with Twitter there's no expectation of an instant answer.

Would you use it again in the future?

Definitely, I'm actually involved with a new start-up that will be launching within the next month, and we have been using Twitter in exactly the same way to keep everyone in the project up-to-date and to allow the easy flow of questions.

-------------------------------

This is an area which I'm very interested in at the moment. If you have used Twitter in an enterprise situation like the one above, or different, I'd be really interested in hearing from you. Email me at joshATinetworkmarketing.co.uk, and Twitter me at /joshuamarch.

Thank you to Mukund Mohan for his time and answers.

Social Media Café this Morning in London

I spent this morning at the London Social Media Café, in Soho. This is a new 'prototype' event set up by Lloyd Davis, who came up with the idea along with Mike Butcher of TechcrunchUK. It was a really good morning, we packed out the top floor of the Coach and Horses and spent a good 3-4 hours connecting and discussing social media.

I found out about the event through the power of Twitter - I was following Mike Butcher who mentioned this morning that he might be going, I Googled it, found the wiki, Google group, Facebook group, and posts by both Mike and Lloyd and decided to go along.

The concept, still in development, is to find either a café or venue (or series of venues) with free wifi which allow social media types in London to come together to network, co-operate and have meetings. This morning was really about the networking, we're looking for somewhere next with multiple floors so that we can have a floor for working, floor for networking, floor for workshops etc.

There was a really good mix of people there, including Mitch McAlister from MySpace, a host of social media developers, consultants, marketers, investors, analysts, journalists, PR agencies and even civil servants. It's great to see that even the government are recognising the importance of social media in communication. As well as the great connections and loads of new follows on Twitter, I had some in-depth conversations on all aspects of social media, including branded application marketing, Twitter as a discussion tool, and Twitter as an Enterprise Tool. I also had a great conversation with Dan Light of PPC Interactive on how different social media tools are used for different types of relationship and varying levels of closeness.

If you're involved in social media in the UK and want to meet some like minds and get involved in the conversation, then join the groups and come along, it's a great event. Also, if you've got good venue suggestions or are interested in sponsoring the event then get in touch with Lloyd (link above), or you can contact me and I'll pass it on.

----------------------------

UPDATE:

I do feel a bit guilty for not mentioning Thayer's truffles - these were pure coco and Trinidadian rum, and were quite simply amazing, honestly the most gorgeous chocolates I've ever had the pleasure of eating. Unfortunately she's refusing requests to go into production, and will only create them for occasional social media cafés - a big incentive to go to every single one, just in case.

Twitter: Customer Service? I don't think so

Recently, Matt Dickman wrote about how Twitter is the 'ultimate customer service tool'. I'm a fan of Matt's blog, and understand what he is saying, however I must disagree with him. As someone who's run customer service focused businesses (I've been in retail) I know that when customers have a problem, they want to speak to a real person, as easily and quickly as possible, either immediately by phone or via a quick response by direct email. They don't want to have to fill in forms online, they don't want to have to read a FAQ first, and they don't want to have to learn something new just to ask a question.

Matt argues that for advanced customer service companies, Twitter is excellent as it always fast and community based dialogue. However, for any company of scale customer service is a serious issue, possibly with a continuous stream of calls, emails, letters etc. These have to be dealt with in a methodical way in order to ensure that every query is dealt with promptly and correctly, by the right person. In my opinion Twitter cannot deliver as a customer service tool because:

1. Most customers would have to learn how to use it first
2. It would require them to sign up to something new just to ask a question
3. They would see their query being lost in a huge flow of others
4. It's very difficult to methodically track individual queries and responses
5. As a company scales the amount of queries could be way beyond what's feasible on a single twitter stream
6. The platform is outside of your control and could go down leaving a major customer services issue.

However, in Matt's most recent post he discusses the importance of listening to the conversation, and shares some great tools to enable this on Twitter. I am completely in agreement with him on this - Twitter is probably the best discursive tool out there, allowing for multiple 1-1 and 1-many conversations at a very high level, and a brilliant community tool. If you're looking to get into the conversation, and become part of it, then Twitter is unparalleled, especially in the social media field.

Of course, there may be a possible future enterprise incarnation of Twitter enabled for customer service, giving multiple channels and multiple authors, and allowing users to post questions without registering, possibly with companies hosting the service themselves. This could be an interesting way of monetising the application, and could very well prove Matt right.

Fast Company becomes social network

FastCompany.com have revamped their web presence to become a community site. I logged on this morning and created a profile, you can see me here. Its the first time a 'mainstream' media site has gone social in this way, and it could be very interesting. We deal with some big media clients, and some of them are actually terrified of what social media and citizen journalism could do to their business. By getting users involved in this way media sites can stay relevant and monetize their content effectively whilst embracing social media without fear.

Jeremiah has written a very good initial analysis of the site here which I recommend you check out. Especially important is his comment on the focus on editorial content. As he says, this is the reason that we go to media websites, otherwise where's the differentiation from groups, forums and other social networks?

Flocking & Twittering

I'm feeling extremely social today. I've been playing with Flock, the social browser, which I'm very, very impressed with. My Facebook friend feed is down the side, making it very easy to keep in touch with what's going on and to communicate with friends, and easy to follow my closest friends photo uploads. If I'm on a website I like, I can click the star next to the address to open up the favourites toolbar to automatically post to delicious, with any tags I want. If I want to share the link with a friend, I can drag it to their Facebook image, post the link to my profile, or email it to someone with a simple click of a button. I've integrated blogspot, so now to blog I just click the blog button and a quick box comes up for me to write my post.

It's all pretty exciting.

Of course, there's a few issues (e.g. no alignment formatting in the blog editor), but I'm very much looking forward to 1.1.

As if this wasn't enough, I've finally signed up to twitter (before this I've just been RSS'ing interesting feeds), which has had me very excited all day. I wasn't too impressed with the Twitter feed for Flock, so looked around for clients and decided on Twitterific which I'm very impressed with (I'm a Mac user). I also added Twitterberry for my blackberry (unlimited dataplan, limited SMS), which does the job but isn't anything special. My twittername is joshuamarch

What do you guys use? Have you tried out flock? What's your favourite Twitter client?

MySpace Platform Launch (London)

I was at the London launch of the MySpace platform launch party yesterday evening, with MySpace CTO Aber Whitcomb, Senior president of Technology Jim Benedetto, and Country Manager for the UK Anthony Lukom, among others from the MySpace Team. 

It was a good event, with an introduction into the platform, a quick look at the basic set of APIs available and how it would work for developers, then it was mainly down to individual chats and questions to the team. One of the interesting features of the MySpace platform is the additional application space, on the users private homepage. This will make certain features much simpler and easier for users, for example notifications, RSS feeds, instant messaging etc, which at the moment (on Facebook and Bebo) must really be done through the canvas pages to be effective. They also confirmed that flash will work fine on profile boxes, which is a step ahead of Facebook and may allow for some more interesting features. 

They also verified that there would be NO manual authorisation of applications, and no value test (although all applications will automatically go through something called CAJA to check Javascript and remove any dangerous code).  

I had a really good chat with Allen Hurff, VP of Engineering, about the platform in general and some specifics. We discussed the >18 and >21 FBML tags recently introduced by Facebook, which is really relevant to some of our clients who don't want to get caught up in engaging with users too young for their services, and Allen confirmed that all applications on the MySpace platform will be able to be tagged as >16 >18 or >21. Despite some peoples claims that this is going to lead to porn (which is against the terms of service of these platforms anyway, duh), these are very useful for brands who target older consumers, for example the drinks industry, who don't want to be seen to be encouraging young drinkers, and of course the social networks themselves who don't want to be seen to be helping this. 

The Flock team were there showing off their 'social web browser', complete with MySpace integration. This looked very, very cool - the social side bar shows whatever social sites you've logged into, and has your friend list there with latest updates at the top, your status updates which you can change through the side bar, and this works automatically once you log in to a site. It also works for Twitter, Flickr etc. One of the very cool features is the easy media sharing and browsing - for example, you can load up all of a friends photos and media into a 'top bar', browse and share this with other people or services, and if you see media you like you can simply drag this onto a friend's photo and it will automatically write the html, links etc into a message to that person on whatever service. 

It will be interesting to see if they add application support at somepoint, so that users can use social network applications straight through the browser. We'll see! 

I'm going to be downloading it and giving it a try, I think it's a great idea and if it increases social network usage all the better for us social media hacks!

The Five Major Attributes of Widgets & Applications

In Learnings from the Widget Roundtable, Jeremiah talked to Ro Choy from RockYou who differentiated clearly between widgets and applications. He defined widgets as limited in functionality, often combined with creating user action outside the widget, e.g. getting them to go to another website. Applications, on the other hand, have full interaction, often with multiple pages and interactivity, and the goal is to get the user engaging with the application rather than going somewhere else. 

They found that because of the range of attributes that are found in widgets and applications, they are impossible to clearly define. Instead, they defined them in terms of how much data interaction they had: 

"Levels of Data Interaction

Highest | Application uses data from your social network | iLike

High | Application uses data from your preferences | Pandora

Low | Application pulls data from source | Audio stream (like a radio station)

None | Static widget, display badge | Widget links to other website"

When we're talking with clients about the types of applications to build, we discuss five major attributes. Most successful applications combine at least 2 of these. 

1. Games (e.g. Scrabulous)

2. Competitions (usually limited in time, with registering or doing things within the widget in order to win a prize)

3. User interaction (an application that allows users to interact with each other in a new way e.g. Funwall, Bob Dylan, Super Poke, and Scrabulous again)

4. Tools (e.g news feeders, football supporter applications, iPlayer, WorldCat (a tool for Academics to find books in libraries))

5. Badges (allowing you to show affiliations or support, e.g. football supporter applications, Causes application, political supporter apps etc).

If we look at the top 15 applications currently listed, based on most active users, we can see how these interact:

1. Photos - tool, user interaction (tags and comments)

2. Fun Wall - user interaction

3. Top Friends - badge, tool (find top friends quickly)

4. Super Wall - user interaction

5. Movies - tool (find good movies), user interaction (share reviews)

6. Bumper Sticker - badge

7. Are YOU Interested? - user interaction, tool (find new friends)

8. Scrabulous - game, user interaction

9. Compare People - user interaction, tool

10. Super Poke - user interaction

11. Texas HoldEm Poker - game, user interaction

12. iLike - badge, tool, plus user interaction and game through music challenge

13. Friends for Sale - game, user interaction

14. Mobile - tool

15. Flirtable - tool, user interaction

One of the primary traits in all of these is user interaction. This is key for virality, and is the key to the success of Facebook generally - if an application allows users to interact in new ways, but you need the application to do that interaction, then it can spread quickly from a small group of initial users. 

Do you agree with my definitions? What would you add/change?