Interesting piece of article many people read and quoted from Read/Write Web blog this week.
Dr. BJ Fogg and Dave McClure taught a class last semester at Stanford on Building Facebook Applications. In 10 weeks, the 80 students had created 50+ applications and in total had over 20 Million installs - with 5 having more than 1 million users. At today’s Graphing Social Patterns conference, BJ and his two teacher assistants shared 10 tips they learned from the experience. Here they are:
- It’s never too late to create a winning app
- Simplicity & clarity are key to app success
- Aim for speed & flexibility in launch and iterations
- Community cooperation leads to success (in other words, the most successful students shared the most)
- Individual opinion about apps are worthless, you need to get out there and see what happens
- Copying success is a cheap / fast way to succeed
- Metrics do matter, but today’s tools are too weak
- You CAN learn to create a winning app
- Success comes from the CHAOS / CONTROL Cycle
- Mass Interpersonal Persuasion is finally here
I really appreciated this follow-up post on the Disruptive Conversations blog.
To that end, what a great way to use Facebook to teach application development! The students:
- Can very easily see their end result (their app) in usage;
- Can compete with each other to see whose app gets more usage (which may drive further development/innovation);
- Can get real feedback from users outside their regular sphere (i.e. “regular” Facebook users not just Stanford students);
- Gain excellent experience and job skills for post-college employment;
- Potentially get job offers now if their app is cool enough;
- Learn all the other skills outside of just programming, such as metrics, marketing, customer interaction, etc.
I wonder what kind of topics and technologies are now teached during the Software Development Project at my University.