Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think

By: Kermit PattisonMay 19, 2008

Fast Interview: Stanford professor BJ Fogg explains why the social networking site is the most powerful thing ever invented.

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Exactly. Even the notion that you know who your market is may go away. You have a lot more visibility now into who's using your service and why, and you can see how it gets socially shared. You don't have to pre-define your market right out of the gate. As long as you watch what's going on, you can adjust and go with what's working. That's been a big lesson for my start-up and I think it's a lesson for lots of people. If you stay tuned to the metrics, both the quantitative and qualitative feedback, you discover the real genius of your creation, rather than trying to impose it on a market that may or may not want it.

What is your startup?

We built an audio tool that allows groups to communicate privately, either live or recorded. It's called YackPack. We thought it would be a tool for connecting families, affiliate groups, and so on. That turned out not to be it. It's a really good tool for teachers, especially ones who teach language. Who knew? When you create a product or service, you can think you know what your market is, but what you really need to do is listen and watch. I'm such a huge advocate because at YackPack we did not do this fast enough. If we had said, Okay, we have to shift gears because we're a language learning company, we would have saved a lot of time and money. It's really about listening and adapting.

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.

What were some of the most successful apps they created?

KissMe, Send Hotness, and Perfect Match all got millions of users and were viral. People invited their friends and they grew very, very quickly. Send Hotness and KissMe were kind of flirty apps. When you look at the college scene, a lot of what they're doing is exploring relationships and those apps seemed to promise to let people do that in a new, fun way. People on Facebook are there for certain reasons, and the apps you bring to them have to fit the reasons that they're there. You can't say, Oh, now we're going to have you learn to make quilts. They're not on Facebook to make quilts.

What's the takeaway?

The ability for ordinary people to create something, put it out in the world, and use metrics and iterations to make it better and better. It's going through this loop of innovation and product design, being guided by users and user data. It's continuing to improve products and experiences based not on guesses, not on consultants, not on checklists, but on real data and real usage. That's very exciting, and it's only going to get easier.