Two schools of thought on how to gain early traction for consumer-focused startups

I'm a co-founder of a startup and I've noticed that our advisors are beginning to form "teams" around two opposing schools of thought for gaining early user adoption.  These two philosophies are mostly mutually exclusive so I think entrepreneurs need to make a choice about which camp they fall into...   Which are you?

Payments: Critical for Social Network App Platforms?

I recently had the pleasure of connecting with TS Ramakrishnan.  Super smart guy and clearly one who know a thing or two about how to launch app platforms/APIs for social networks.

TS has an interesting short-list of four requirements for a successful social network app platform:

1. Users -- the social network must be large enough to bring lots of distribution to app publishers


2. Language -- platform must be backwards compatible with existing web development languages/frameworks


3. Marketing -- the social network must expend significant effort to recruit, retain, and support app developers


4. Transactions --  the social network must facilitate secure transactions (i.e., payments)

I found his last requirement to be really thought-provoking...  It sounds like a pre-requisite for ecommerce transactions, but we haven't seen a whole lot of apps pursue ecommerce models yet on social networks.  The vast majority of social apps are 100% ad-supported, but we're starting to see some "freemium" models develop.  For instance, Slide's SuperPoke app has Premium poke actions that users can get access to via a monthly subscription.

Even in an advertising-dominated economy, I wonder if the social apps on Facebook might monetize more efficiently if Facebook were to facilitate the payments/collections process between ad networks and app publishers?  E.g., would social ad networks operate more efficiently if ad units were rendered in FBML and Facebook provided standardized tools for measuring impressions, clicks, follow-on actions, pathing; and financial transaction support for buying/selling social ads...

The Four Viral App Objectives (a.k.a., "Social network application virality 101")

A lot of folks have asked for more details on the way we measured and optimized viral app growth in the Stanford class I co-taught recently. So here's a bit more info on methodology for measuring virality and what it means for an app to "go viral."

K-factor and R-zero

Terms like "K-factor" (contagion) and "R-zero" (reproduction rate) are often used to describe the growth rate of viral apps. These terms come from the fields of medicine and biology -- they're originally intended to describe the spread of of viral diseases, but they're nice analogies for how web/SN apps grow. Some would even describe widgets and apps as "diseases" that have "corrupted" popular social networks like MySpace and Facebook! ;-) Of course, having worked at Slide and authored some FB apps of my own, that's clearly not my belief... So, read on if you're interested in viral apps!

[digg=http://digg.com/programming/The_Four_Viral_App_Objectives]