I recently received a link to see what type of lover I am. I jumped to the gun immediately, as expected. I mean, who isn’t curious about those big issues in life. So, after filling out an extensive 5 question quiz that comprehended issues such as my favorite time of the year, I submitted my answers and eagerly expected my answer. It was then that the application asked me to send the quiz to 15 friends in order to see my answer. And that’s what I did. It was only then that I realized that I received the quiz via the same mechanism - somebody wanted to see what type of lover they were and innocently forwarded the quiz to 15 unsuspecting victims.
The truth is that the Facebook system for applications is ground-breaking in many senses - it allows companies and individuals to create applications related to certain content and that engage with the users to a certain extent. But they only work if the users have an incentive to push the application onto others in their social network. Therefore there are two ways - either the application is that good or there is a mechanism that makes the user has to send an invitation. Continue reading ‘API Spam - or The API Virality Patterns’