The ultimate FB app (or, what I learned at Stanford)

I went to Stanford the other night for the presentation of the Facebook class's apps. In case you don't know about it, they did a 10 week course about making Facebook apps at Stanford this fall. It was taught by a psych professor who specializes in persuasion, so it wasn't all about hacking and making cool stuff.

Based on those learnings and my own learnings, here is the ultimate viral growth app: Free Money. Here's how it works:

1. Add app, with the instructions that if you invite 20 friends a day for 10 days, you will get $20 sent to you in the mail. The app is one page - instructions and an invite box.
2. Turn it on, let everyone invite everyone else.
3. If anyone actually invites 200 friends (it's OK to invite more than once) then put up a text area requesting their mailing address and telling them that it's 6 weeks to process their check.

Within a few weeks, you will have millions of people using your app. You might have to tweak the wording to get people to believe that they will actually get their money. Maybe you can even make money doing this if you can get people to sign up for various mail-in offers, etc, ie lead gen. You'll probably get in magazines and on CNN.

This thought exercise is meant to evidence the big problem with FB apps right now: in order to go viral, you have to make your app not very functional, and instead spend all your energy on making some sort of viral invitation machine. From there, you can make something more engaging.

Facebook has to change this - people are getting sick of the invitation machine apps, and developers who want to work on more interesting apps, but can't get a user base, are getting sick of having to compete with the invitation machine apps.