Facebook/Open Social App – when is the right time to launch?

Recently a friend of mine launched a facebook application and sent out an invite to all his friends. As a friend, I got curious to see what he had developed and quickly went ahead and installed it. I started playing around with the app to see what it had to offer. To my surprise the app just had a canvas page showing off latest content from his site (daily recipes) All links from the canvas page took me directly to his site. Immediately I had a question to ask – ‘Was this the right time to launch the application?’

For a facebook/opensocial app to succeed, its mandatory for it to have social features. When you interact with an app in some way, your friends come to know (via activity feed) and if they find it interesting they go ahead and start playing with the app as well. When you are developing an app, first question you should ask yourself is – ‘Does this app have atleast 1-2 features that will help spread it virally?’ If the answer is no, you should wait and work towards it. My friend shared the app with all his friends without adding any viral features to it. Needless to say, they must have installed it but may not find an immediate need to come back and visit the app every day or atleast every week.

You just get one change to promote your application and invite your friends to check it out. If you don’t leave a lasting impression in the first shot, you have more or less lost those many valuable users. Even later on if you add viral/social features to the app, these users may not come back. Lesson learned the hard way!

If you are developing an opensocial or facebook application, please learn from this and don’t repeat the same mistake. Yes, its important to get your product out as soon as possible and than iterate over it to make it better, but at times launching too early can turn out to be a bad option.

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