Viral Loop: The Power of Pass-It-On by Adam Penenberg

A book that covers the social media explosion, being used by companies to generate demand for thier products.  It looks at measurement techniques to track how 'viral' your website is, and how you can make it more attractive (basically content, content, content and connections - provided by the users themselves since you can never scale as fast as they can).

It also looks at how becoming part of such communities is actaully good for you as well, thos ewith more social connections actually living longer.

Somewhere in the world a party occurred just in the time it took you to read this sentence. Almost 120 million people in one hundred countries will attend a product demonstration this year.Read more at location 661 •

Andreessen had uncorked a “network effect,” a term first used to describe the spread of the telephone in the early years of the twentieth century. Simply put, the more people who own a telephone, the more valuable an added line is to each person already on the network. The potential number of connections grows exponentially in relation to the number of people on the network.Read more at location 764 •
In 1992, 4.5 million people were plugged into the Internet and there were perhaps fifty websites. By the end of 1993, 1 million people had downloaded Mosaic, there were 6 million total users, and 623 websites. Within a year the online population jumped to 13 million with 10,000 websites. Web traffic shot up more than 300 percent, with users creating their own home pages, uploading photos, and setting up chat rooms. Today’s Web, with more than 1.5 billion users worldwide and almost 200 million websites, owes its existence to three men: Paul Baran of the Rand Corporation, who conceived the Internet; Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web; and Marc Andreessen, who figured out how to navigate it.Read more at location 787 •

Andreessen saw it as a simple equation: market share today equals revenue later; without market share, you don’t generate revenue, but whoever achieves and hangs on to it wins.Read more at location 873 •
These viral loop companies provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, relying on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content; the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines, the more value the company has.Read more at location 1069 •
Why do we do it? What explains our BlackBerry-bearing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook friend with the need for constant connectivity? As facile as it sounds, we do it because we are hard-wired to socialize. It’s in our best interests. One reason we gravitate toward communities is because they multiply the impact of each individual to bring greater prosperity, security, and fulfillment to all.Read more at location 1250 •
Research indicates that engaging with friends helps us live longer and better lives, with those with strong friendship bonds having lower incidents of heart disease. They even get fewer colds and flu. A decade-long Australian study found that for the duration of the study subjects with a sizable network of friends were 22 percent less likely to pass away than those with a small circle of friends—and the distance separating two friends and the amount of contact made no difference. It didn’t matter if the friends stayed in contact via phone, letter, or email. Just the fact that they had a social network of friends acted as a protective barrier.Read more at location 1258 •
“When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn’t look are not our ancestors,”Read more at location 1351 •
“The more in control we are, the more out of touch we become. But the more willing we are to let go a little, the more we’re finding we get in touch with consumers.”Read more at location 2152 •
Thiel subscribed to a theory of human behavior known as “mimetic desire,” propounded by French historian and philosopher René Girard, who believed that people were essentially sheep who, without much reflection, borrowed their desires from others. This theory has been applied to describe financial bubbles and panics,Read more at location 2773 •
Where would she stash a photo of, say, her best friend on vacation at the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia at sunrise with a monkey nicknamed “Filch” running off with a tourist’s backpack? In a folder labeled Vacation? Angkor Wat? Melinda? Monkey? Tagging allowed the photo to be easily found in all of these contexts. And since anyone could add a tag and a comment, it became a democratic mode of organizationRead more at location 3070 •
This led to MySpace being discovered by a powerfully viral segment of the population: teenaged girls, who joyfully shared coding tips with one another. Because it drained bandwidth and slowed down the site, MySpace engineers proposed putting a stop to this, but DeWolfe overruled them. He realized that fighting users was a useless exercise that would only limit their growth. Let Friendster alienate its user base. MySpace would out-friendly Friendster.Read more at location 3127 •
“People are going to go and socialize where their friends are, and once you have a person’s friends list in a social community locked in, viral growth really happens,”Read more at location 3136 •
Simplifying the instructions also helped. In fact, the rule seemed to be, the simpler he made things, the more viral the site became. People, it seemed, were turned off by anything that required them to think.Read more at location 3244 •
TravBuddy and Travellers-point connect inveterate travelers.Read more at location 3396 •
when the landscape was particularly barren and there was little utility for early adopters. “The value that people get is tied to how much information everyone is sharing,” Zuckerberg says. He and his roommates encouraged the first wave of registrants in the ramping-up period to share information through pictures. The second wave would see the information and attract the first wave back,Read more at location 3459 •
They thought of their target audience and realized that they—and the engineers they were hiring—were out of touch. Most people at Stanford didn’t use MySpace. They thought it was a joke. So before they would release an application, one of them would say, “Let’s hear what Sandi says,” and she would offer her impressions.Read more at location 3614 •
If there is one constant through time, it’s that conventional wisdom often misses the mark, especially in the early days of technological transformation. In 1876, the president of Western Union brushed off Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone as little more than an “electric toy,” and the company called Bell’s proposal to put one in every home “utterly out of the question.”Read more at location 3677 •
Advertisers advance the science of advertising, discovering all manner of ways of reaching us, then consumers become expert at shedding messages they don’t want to hear. In essence, it’s a media version of an arms race.Read more at location 3726 •
If you are in your forties or older, your parents didn’t talk about their feelings; today you can barely stop people from telling you their life stories. And today’s youth, congregating on social networks, share the most intimate aspects of their lives, hewing to an ethos of karmic bulimia. If they don’t announce something on Facebook it’s, like, it never happened. And they are shaping the privacy debate as profoundly as the corporations that mine our data, the banks that sell it, the credit agencies that profit from it, and the government that vacuums it up.Read more at location 3817 •
there is a phenomenon in peoples’ interaction. “The message you get, in a lot of ways, is actually less important than who you get it from,” he says. “If you get it from someone that you trust, you’ll listen to it. Whereas if you get it from someone you don’t trust, you might actually believe the opposite of what they said because you don’t trust them.Read more at location 3885 •
That is the premise of the viral loop application that you will find on Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks, or at www.viralloop.com. Download it and it will tell you what your viral coefficient is and your value—in dollars—to Facebook et al., based on the company’s current valuation, your level of activity, and the activity of your friends.Read more at location 3912 •