virality on facebook
0 to 1MM in 4 weeks

virality on facebook
0 to 1MM in 4 weeks
0 to 6MM in 9 weeks

alexander le
siqi chen

why virality matters

numbers
6,000,000 pages / day 2 people
1,400,000 users 10 days (part time)
300,000 daily active 2 months
80,000 new users / day $0 marketing

why a platform?

how ideas spread

media social

media distribution
print
blogs
banners
television
radio

media distribution
expensive
untargetted
untrusted

social distribution
referrals
interactions
recommendations
invitations

social distribution
cheaper
faster
trusted
scalable

what enables
social distribution?

the social graph
enables social distribution

facebook applications
photos
events
groups

facebook photos
8.5MM photos per day (june 2006)
more than next 3 sites combined
less features than the other guys
why?

social graph > features

your friends and their photos
>
cool whiz bang feature x

facebook’s stated mission is to
model the social graph in digital form as
accurately and completely as possible.

the facebook platform exposes
the social graph to everybody
with an idea, enabling rapid social
distribution of new applications.

facebook applications
photos
events
groups
your application here

choosing the idea
is it social?
is it engaging?
is it universal?

is it social?
so that it’s viral

is it engaging?
so that it’s ... uh
engaging.
and monetizatable

is it universal?
so that it has potential

special considerations
“If you want to get rich, make a
porn site. If you want to get really
rich, make something that helps
people get laid in real life.”
- Paraphrased from Paul Graham

new application
friends for sale

friends for sale
it’s
... hot or not with a market economy
... a dating app without ‘dating’
... kinda kinky

social
buy and sell your friends
direct user to user interaction
every touch point is a viral channel

engaging
virtual economy with a twist
low pressure social interactions
... and flirting
makes for a great, cynical dating app

universal
everybody is vain
everybody has a price
everybody wants to flirt with hot
people

metrics for virality
for every new user
how many new users do they convert?
> 1.4 is exponential growth

virality in depth
for every new user,
track ... for every channel,
...
# of invites
# of notifications
% clicked
# of minifeed items
% converted
# of profile clicks
% uninstalls
# ... other channels

virality in depth
for every new user,
track ... for every channel,
...
# of invites
# of notifications
% clicked
# of minifeed items
% converted
# of profile clicks
% uninstalls
# ... other channels

scalability

scalability

scalability

“Don’t scale until you
need to.”

“... unless you’re on
Facebook.”

scaling is a requirement
0 - 1 million pages / day in 4 weeks
... is pretty slow on Facebook
Don’t be this guy:
“We need servers. Anything you can spare, and we need
them NOW. We’ve doubled our servers and doubled
again and Facebook just eats them up.”
- Ali Partovi (iLike’s CEO)

scaling
memcached, memcached, MEMCACHED
good hardware, well configured
good host (Softlayer ROCKS)
you NEED an awesome MySQL DBA

development
ruby on rails
(in the top 5 largest installations on the internet, by page views)
rfacebook
(good for getting started, but had to write our own for
maintainability and performance)

does rails scale?
dumb question, but I guess.

architectures scale,
frameworks don’t
anything scales on the right architecture.
focus on the architecture and operations.

the future
the platform is six months old.
movement towards engaging, deep apps.
the landscape is wide open.
what did the web look like six months into it?

the end.
questions?