DISQUS

On the behalf of RockYou, I want to apologize to all of our publishers for the slip. While it was unintended, it was a material mistake. We take privacy of all our partners very seriously and will review and correct the process that enabled this immediately. We will continue to work hard to maximize your results but also to regain and maintain your trust. Please email me directly with any questions, issues or concerns (ro@rockyou.com - yes, I'm willing to share the pain).

Sincerely,

Ro Choy

VP Business Development
RockYou

Hmm. Usually I really like Mashable for its well founded opinions. Yall are ridiculous. This is exactly the same thing folks said about MySpace and the use of widgets, only to see the ability to provide an outlet for self expression drive MySpace to one of the top 10 most visited sites on the web globally. Opening Facebook beyond colleges drove its growth period, and made it a global force versus a niche site used by few. Opening Facebook as a platform also drove its growth materially, for the exact same reason widgets drove MySpace's growth. If all you could do on Facebook was read people's wall posts and check out photos, its usage WOULD be suspect to different alternatives. People want choices folks - that's what a platform brings to Facebook at the cost of maintaining the platform itself. I'm guessing the demographic mix between Mashable readers and Facebook users correlates to near -1.

Nick-

To put some context for your readers:

1) We volunteered to lead a 2.5 hour workshop for new Facebook developers looking to grow both organically (i.e. viral) and on a paid basis. Over that period I walked through a presentation which offered a lot of advice focused on how to tune their applications by providing clean flows, focusing on new users and leveraging invite processes to their benefit. All of that presentation material I assume will be openly offered by www.graphingsocial.com or can be accessed by emailing me directly at ro@rockyou.com. Note that there was no mention or reference to 'spamming' users in any part of that presentation. In fact, I made an explicit point of pointing out how improving user engagement can increase virality of an app.

2) A the end of the workshop, I offered the opportunity for developers to present their applications live to the audience and have me walk them through how to improve the viral engagement and growth of their app. The point here was to help these individual developers, with nothing in return for RockYou. One of the apps presented had a significant issue in generating awareness. I informed that developer of a notification process to help generate awareness that is an openly offered capability of the Facebook platform, openly documented by Facebook, and used by almost every major application developer who reads through the Facebook API documentation. I also made a direct reference that this notification format can often result as being marked by 'spam' by users, and result in the application being blocked from further external notifications as a result. Hence that notification process is short lived in its utility (5-7 days). Honestly, I'd be remiss in talking about organic strategies on Facebook without mentioning it.

3) Most importantly, RockYou has never used this notification process to our advantage, whereas several of our competitors used this exclusively to grow at our significant expense from a competitive perspective. Facebook's own filtering system quickly blocked overuse of this notification process by our competitors, which convinced us this was not a path to pursue for ourselves.

RockYou's perspective, as leader in this space, is to be as open and transparent as possible about how we've been successful in order to generate success for as many others across the Facebook platform. The more successful developers there are, the more pageviews and users on Facebook, the more interest from advertisers as a whole in this community, which ultimately helps RockYou and everyone involved on Facebook. Feel free to email or call me with any questions.

Ro

I find it interesting that almost all of the sites you mention Christopher - Friendster, Gaia, MySpace, Orkut, Cyworld, Bebo hi5, LinkedIn, Tagged, Multiply, imeem, Xanga and Facebook are seeing strong growth off large user bases. Not seeing the hype you're referring to.

I guess Paypal would be a parasitic service in your mind Robert?

Peter, did Iqons give you access to a to-be-launched test-site? The public version is a real mess. I tried to find embeds for my profile and could barely figure out how to upload a photo. The current interface is very very poor.

vote: Rockyou

I nominate Rockyou!