What are your top five favorite albums, movies, or books of all-time? What about your top five favorite beers, things to have when zombies attack, or destructive world leaders?
Tim O’Shaughnessy, CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial.com, has watched as his “Pick Your Five” application exploded in users on Facebook over the past several weeks. Since March, LivingSocial.com’s “Pick Your Five” feature has gone viral millions of times over, attracting up to 150,000 new users per hour and more than 6 million new users in its first week launch alone. The application allows you to pick any of your top five likes or dislikes and share them with your friends. Currently, the application has more than 17,700,000 monthly active users on Facebook.
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O’Shaughnessy co-founded LivingSocial.com, a “social discovery and cataloging network,” with Val Aleksenko, Aaron Batalion, and Eddie Frederick in 2007. Before creating LivingSocial.com, he ran the product group at Revolution Health and worked at AOL in product development. He is a graduate of Georgetown University, and has been in Washington, D.C. ever since helping build consumer Web products.
How is the LivingSocial.com application different from other favorites or list-sharing applications on Facebook?
LivingSocial makes it really easy and simple for you to share with your friends. It’s worked so well because the lists are so broad and creative, and our database is so comprehensive that users can literally find nearly anything that they’re looking for.
The “Pick Your Five” feature is now all over Facebook. The idea is so simple, but why is it just now being fully conceptualized and launched successfully by an application developer?
I think there are a few reasons that it really took off. First, the new Facebook “stream” really made it much easier for users to share things with their friends. Second, many people who have tried something similar were usually trying to cram too many features into their versions. We kept it simple and have had great success because of it.
How did the “Pick Your Five” application take off so quickly? Was there a lot of promotion?
No, it was all organic. People just wanted to share their lists with their friends, and it really just grew from there.
| “To let users more freely express themselves, we let them add additional items to the database. Overall, we really leverage our user feedback to shape the product.” |
How does the content, design, and layout of the “Pick Your Five” feature promote virality?
There are a couple of key points: First and foremost, the fact that people can select, order and publish their five from the same page has gone a long way toward keeping users in a mode where they want to publish. Second, the content itself is oftentimes something people took care in selecting, so they really want to show it off! Picking the five movies you’d watch over and over again is hard, so when you’ve decided, you want to show it off.
Why are “lists” — whether it’s LivingSocial.com’s application or the “Notes” that people write and tag — so popular on social networking sites like Facebook?
Social networking sites are really all about communication and sharing. The examples you mention have been going on in some shape or form for ages. People have written notes to each other for ages… or played the “Best five actors of the 1990s” (or similar) game in conversations for much longer than social networks have been around. [Social networks] are just a new medium to communicate and share through that didn’t previously exist; what was popular before works in this form of communication, as well.
What kind of user feedback are you receiving to the application, and how are you responding?
The biggest piece of user feedback we received was within the first few days of the launch of the application. We initially didn’t let users add items to our database, but it was impossible to keep up with all the requests. So, to let users more freely express themselves, we let them add additional items to the database. Overall, we really leverage our user feedback to shape the product. We have a team that processes through all feedback we receive so we can better shape our road map.
How can other developers optimize their applications for Facebook’s new site features?
The biggest things are: No. 1, make it easy for users to create or find something they want to share, and No. 2., give them the opportunity to publish that to the feed.
| “It’s not always the case that, just because we’re friends, we care about the same news. If somebody can solve that problem, there is a pretty big opportunity.” |
How has the LivingSocial.com application performed with the iPhone and other social networking sites like Bebo.com and MySpace?
We’ve really focused on Facebook and LivingSocial.com, so we are not a great barometer of other platforms.
Quizzes and applications come and go on Facebook, while the LivingSocial.com application has stuck around for several weeks now. To what do you attribute its relative staying power?
I think we’ve done a good job of bringing fresh and timely content to users. For example, we just had 100,000 people take a poll, “Who is to blame, Jon or Kate?” after the TLC show [Jon & Kate Plus 8] began to get so much press.
Can you predict the next big social networking application phenomenon?
I wish. If we could, we’d build it.
What do you want the next big social networking application phenomenon to be?
I don’t think anyone has cracked the nut on delivering relevant news. Twitter is great from a breaking news standpoint, but it has its limitations with regards to accuracy, and it doesn’t really give content specific to me. In the Facebook world, friends occasionally share news, but it’s not always the case that, just because we’re friends, we care about the same news. If somebody can solve that problem, there is a pretty big opportunity.
Where do you see LivingSocial.com in the next five years?
Well, I don’t necessarily see it as a dot-com. I think LivingSocial is a brand that lives across a variety of platforms, the dot-com site being one of them, but Facebook, the iPhone, or the next big things being other platforms. People will come to view us as the pre-eminent place to share and communicate around interests.
Five tips for creating viral social networking applications:
1. K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple Stupid).
2. A/B test your products like crazy — text, images, everything. It’s amazing how much you can move the needle.
3. Make something people will want to share with their friends. If people don’t want to communicate about what they’ve just interacted with, it will be very hard to be viral.
4. The subject matter matters. You don’t see a ton of viral apps about banking or healthcare.
5. If a user can interact with the application for more than two minutes and not have had an opportunity to create something to share, you’re probably in trouble.
Jennifer Pullinger is a Richmond, Va.-based writer and communications professional with more than 10 years of experience in marketing, media relations, and journalism.
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