What makes a facebook app a success? I was in palo alto last night at PARC and attended the facebook success presentations from some of the class participants from the Stanford facebook class. The class instructors were Dr. BJ Fogg and Dave McClure.

The participants showed very quick presentations about their apps and shared how they measured success. There were 2 core metrics they focused on: Viralness and Engagement.

There were many instances shown of how the apps actually evolved over time and went through several iterations. I have some video coming of a few of the presentations.

The more complex the app; the less viral it was. The simplest apps spread the fastest. Hugs, kisses, etc.

The more complex the app the higher the time spent by users on the canvas pages.

The other lesson from the students of the facebook class was metrics were critical. Many of the teams set up custom metrics (beyond the standard Google Analytics) to measure very specific details of an aplication. They could then do A/B split testing on things such as page layout, images, text, user flow, etc. Sometimes they could get enough statisically signifigant data in under 12 hours to measure the effectiveness of different iterations.

The other lesson was that collectively as a group they could learn from each other and see what was working for other teams and try different variations of that particular trait.

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