Gabriel Weinberg wrote that “If I were starting out, I would clone threewords.me” because it’s inherently viral. Doing something viral, he says, is fun, gives you a crash course in scaling, and gives you lots of eyeballs to use for either your current project or your next one. There was some argument on Hacker News about whether it’s random whether or not something will “go viral,” or if virality is something inherent to an app itself. Here is some speculation about what makes something viral.
To quote Douglas Adams, “Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again.” If we’re talking about behaviors, if something causes itself to happen again to the same person, we call it addictive. If it causes itself to happen again to other people, we call it a meme, an idea virus. To spread memetically, a behavior has to first be performed by someone. Secondly, that behavior, in being performed, has to encourage others to follow suit. Thirdly, it has to maintain its integrity: generation N has to be as capable of perpetuating itself as generation N – 1.
How does this work for apps? First, you write it, put it on the web or in the app store or whatever. You tell a friend and they buy it. They tell a couple other friends, because they like you. Those friends buy it. They don’t tell their friends, because they don’t know you, and it’s an OK app but not great. Rewind. Let’s say that you make your app so that in order to interact with it in a meaningful way, your friend has to tell their friends. I didn’t get past the sign-up page for Threewords.me, but I suspect this is what it does. You put in three words about Alice, and it writes a message to your twitter stream. Something like “Alice: #petite, #busty, #brunette. What three words describe me? http://threewords.me”.
This should spread because at each stage it activates people’s desires both to know what people think of them, and for gossip and drama about other people. So why aren’t we drowning in this kind of inane meme? Because most memes eventually lose their integrity. Your viral software can lose its integrity because it runs out of some kind of energy that fuels it. For example, your server runs out of resources and you either don’t have the skill or money to expand to more servers. Or maybe your viral loop involves some kind of interaction with physical things you provide, or takes up some amount of your limited time at each stage. Ideally, your virus provides some means of replenishing this energy. You get lots of eyeballs looking at your site, which you monetize with advertising or by upgrading them from freemium to premium, and you use the money to buy more servers. Another kind of energy is novelty, which can run out if there are a lot of similar memes running around.
We also have memetic immune systems. The Psych 101 term is “attitude innoculation.” When we’re exposed to a new idea or behavior, we build up resistance to it unless we expect to get something out of it. Once ideas are ingrained, we use these ideas to resist other ideas. We also, seem to want the original form of an idea. So a viral app has to present itself in a way that either doesn’t present a threat to old behaviors, or is novel enough that resistance hasn’t been built up to the idea, or in some other way gets around the psychic immune system.
Eventually every meme loses its integrity, so its author should design it so that it can be transformed into something more useful than growth for growth’s sake.
