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Followers>>Leaders

Well, it is indeed a tragic fact that there are many more followers than leaders in the world. I realize this when we launched our first Facebook app last night. Initially, we thought that most people would love to try something new, but the fact is that more people intend to watch others first, then decide whether they want to join.

When we first added the news feeds, we fully considered about people's privacy concern. i,e., we only post news feeds on the initial gossip creator's wall and never show the feeds on other related persons' walls. That's a way to eliminate duplication of the same message displaying on one's news feeds. However, the initial gossip creator may not be a big node in the social network. It's the people being gossiped that really make the difference!

Why these people get gossiped? Because they attract followers' eyeballs, they are different from these followers! Unless these people love to gossip, otherwise, our app would have got no users. But usually these people are not gossipers, we have to change our strategy.

With the termination of the old facebook api, some useful methods are no longer available. We cannot get the mutual friends of the login user and another person who's not our app user. Neither can we get the full friends list of a person if our app is not authorized by him/her. But we can post news feeds on the related friends' wall. To make the news feeds less annoying, we only display the message on one of the related friends' walls.

Gossips should be designed for the followers to discuss about those leaders, not for the leaders to make the world more chaotic.

Comments

  1. Tey3 September 2011 at 17:04

    I am rather impressed with your application. Your team can really made very good UI. Perhaps, your application is not suited to facebook as there are a lot of privacy issues involved. But rather emphasizing on gossip, which i believe nobody like to have people gossiping behind their back, the model can perhaps change to suit the needs of people. Just my thoughts.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shao5 September 2011 at 12:29

    Thank you. Yup, our UI programmer is really a superhero:)It's a really good experience. I cannot tell whether the app is going to be successful or not.Time will tell~ Good Luck to you Jun Hong:)

    ReplyDelete

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