This link has been bookmarked by 9 people . It was first bookmarked on 18 Apr 2008, by someone privately.
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05 Jun 09
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PayPal came into being because buyers and sellers on eBay needed a way to complete transactions online
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YouTube took off by piggybacking on the success of MySpace, becoming the go-to site for video posters and watchers alike.
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Google's Gadget Ads was spun off as a mini viral network to serve ads on the tens of thousands of widgets created for Facebook, MySpace, and others
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OpenSocial
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Think of it as the cyber equivalent of introducing standard railroad gauge during the industrial revolution, which helped spur America's economic development coast to coast.
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benefits from a "double viral loop,"
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because every network creator is a user and any user can become a network creator.
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Ning swells like a river fed from an ever-growing number of tributaries.
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Viral loops expand according to what's known as a Power Law Curve, which, for reasons no one can explain seem to accurately describe a dizzying array of natural and unnatural phenomena, from the size of planets to national income distribution to online commerce.
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being big doesn't necessarily mean you will make a profit
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Indeed, nearly a third of its networks don't take off, but this mortality doesn't cost the company a cent, unlike unsold blenders at a Wal-Mart.
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in this new phase of Webonomics, it's not just the eyeballs, stupid, as it was before the dotcom crash. It's the kind of eyeballs you collect and how you can slice, dice, and model them.
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Right now, Google places Ning's ads, but eventually, Bianchini and Andreessen plan to serve their own.
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About 3% of group leaders chose this option. Either way, Ning makes out.
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23 Apr 08
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But viral loops are better suited to the frictionless environment of the Internet, where a message or idea can carry essentially forever.
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Significantly, viral-loop networks don't create content -- they organize it. They provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, and then rely on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it.
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19 Apr 08
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There are three categories of viral expansion loops -- let's call them "viral loops," "viral networks," and "double viral loops," the last a hybrid of the first two.
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But it's on a viral network that scale and power really snowball. A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each "friend" reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same.
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There are three categories of viral expansion loops -- let's call them "viral loops," "viral networks," and "double viral loops,"
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But it's on a viral network that scale and power really snowball.
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Significantly, viral-loop networks don't create content -- they organize it. They provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, and then rely on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content, the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines. "The viral adoption model" is the "cheapest way to grow an audience," says Union Square Ventures' Wilson. At no time in history has it been possible to market to so many by starting with so little.
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18 Apr 08
Jorge BarbaAnnotated link http://www.diigo.com/bookmark/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fastcompany.com%2Fmagazine%2F125%2Fnings-infinite-ambition.html%3Fpage%3D0%252C3
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But viral loops are better suited to the frictionless environment of the Internet, where a message or idea can carry essentially forever. Andreessen himself created what is widely perceived as the first online viral loop when he and Eric Bina of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications unleashed the Mosaic browser, the precursor to Netscape Navigator, in April 1993. They shared it with 12 beta users, which blossomed to 100 users, then to 1,000, 10,000, and reaching 1 million in the first 12 months. There was no feature in the browser to make it spread, but its mere existence influenced people to create Web pages. That in turn gave incentive to others to get online, which acted as a catalyst for others to create more Web pages, and so on.
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There are three categories of viral expansion loops -- let's call them "viral loops," "viral networks," and "double viral loops," the last a hybrid of the first two. To create a simple viral loop is relatively straightforward. In 1996, Hotmail placed a link in the body of every message, offering the recipient the ability to set up his own Webmail account, and within 30 months went from zero to 30 million members. YouTube deployed a viral mechanism by allowing anyone to embed a video link in his blog or MySpace page: The more who saw it, the more links were embedded, and soon, millions of users were funneled directly to YouTube. Also in this category are scads of widget makers creating the digital bling disseminated on Facebook, MySpace, and elsewhere -- the infamous "hatching egg," glitzy slide-show creation tools distributed by Slide and RockYou, the online Scrabble game Scrabulous, horoscopes, calendars, and so forth. These widgets are so contagious that Slide alone was able to raise $50 million in venture capital from Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price, giving it a $500 million valuation.
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But it's on a viral network that scale and power really snowball. A destination such as Facebook grows via invitations, with each "friend" reaching out to her own set of contacts, which in turn do the same. More than half of the undergraduate population at Harvard joined within a month of Facebook's 2004 launch; four years later, it has 67 million active users. And at its current 3% weekly expansion rate, it will have 200 million users by the end of the year, equal to the population of the fifth-largest nation on earth.
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Significantly, viral-loop networks don't create content -- they organize it. They provide an environment that is, in theory, almost infinitely scalable, and then rely on the wisdom of crowds to create or aggregate masses of material to fill it. The more people, the more content, the more powerful the lure for those sitting on the sidelines. "The viral adoption model" is the "cheapest way to grow an audience," says Union Square Ventures' Wilson. At no time in history has it been possible to market to so many by starting with so little.
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