Hi Will,

Sorry for the long post, but please bear with me- this is in several parts:

----------------

PROBLEM?

Regarding the "invite people" functionality which you currently have enabled for groups via email and check boxes for current friends, I would like suggest some enchancements to this.

Firstly, I think the "invite people" functionality is key to the growth of any social networking site since one reason for the success of Facebook is because you can import your entire email address book very easily and choose which friends you want to invite as friends.

Secondly Facebook, has such features as "suggested friends" whcih you could also invite as friends (which stems from your email address book import in the first place). I think we all know how this results in exponential growth- hence FB's success!

Without being able to add friends from an address book, people simply cannot be bothered to manually go through their address book by hand cutting and pasting emails, hence there will be no rapid growth of a site's users.

Therefore I think the lack of an ability to import an address book limits the rapid growth of any site's user base.

If you can import an address book, you can store this in a table and to join tables with other users to come up such functionality as "invite people", "suggested friends" and "mutual friends"- hence more rapid growth of a sites users!

INITIAL SOLUTION?

Ventrian.com have an example using Plaxo to import address books here

http://www.ventrian.com/Products/Mo...fault.aspx

Don't know if there is better way to do this?

CONCLUSION

If you can import address books in Active Social, to create functionality such as "invite people", "suggested friends" and "mutual friends"I think this would help to grow an ActiveSocial site's user base significantly- hence better for us and better for Active Modules...



Finally, thanks for a great product!

Good post. I think you nailed that. I'm guilty of pulling up a refer a friend thingy and when there's no access to my address book, that's all she wrote; I'm outta there like a career politician come November 2, cuz I simply cannot be bothered.

We the people are lazy! Cater to it or suffer.

Thanks for that.

If you want to make an AS websites grow virally, then address book import functionality is essential (in my opinion!!!!).

This is a good conversation. I would like to eventually see an invite function incorporated as a step in the sign up and group creation as well rather than a separate "second step" process.

This would be a great feature to have. I hope it makes it to the development board!

When I get chance I am going to look into creating a 'suggested friends' based on proximity for sites where user's/group's location is important.

This will be achieved using the fatgeorge GeoCoder, Netism's Satellite Extreme and the Active Social client API to expose the 'add a friend' capability.

Posted By Steven Webster on 03 Nov 2010 07:41 AM
This is a good conversation. I would like to eventually see an invite function incorporated as a step in the sign up and group creation as well rather than a separate "second step" process.

I agree.

Sorry everyone, realised the subject of this discussion should include: Creating a viral AS website. So I have changed the subject title to include that.

That's exactly what we are discussing here, something that makes AS more viral which is needed to build a BIG user base on an AS website.

To do this we need address book functionality detailed in the first post of this discussion, namely:

1. Import address book in the registration process as mentioned by Steve Webster above (thanks Steve)
2. Invite people from the address book post registration (address book emails permanently stored in a SQL table so its always there)
3. Suggested friends (using the above table so that you can cross correlate emails for future registrations using SQL)
4. Mutual friends (ditto)

An examination of Facebook shows why this functionality makes Facebook viral, hence FB's enormous growth.

I know there is some SQL magic here, but I'm not sure it's not that difficult (easy to say when you don't have to write it- apologies Will)!

Would make a large difference all...

Seems to be a bunch of code samples and libraries out there which could enable it. I agree that it can contribute hugely to the success of a site - especially "see who in your contacts is already using the site"

I really like seeing posts like this. Having customers share ideas and provide feedback is crucial to any product. I think it is also important for us to share our experiences and how certain features can affect the overall customer base. My goal of this reply is not to turn this into a debate about the desired featured, but to provide some background, options and opinions to help everyone looking to grow a site.

*** Disclaimer: While my opinions do have an affect on the feature set of our products, adding customer desired features is based upon overall customer feedback. We have added features to our products that I have been 100% against in the past, which will probably happen in this situation as well. ***

I'm not a fan of the whole import address book concept and spam contacts concept. However, there are two different purposes for the "import and invite" functionality. I've seen a couple references to Facebook in this post and others like it about this functionality being the key to Facebook's growth. Facebook has hundred's of millions of users. For the sake of discussion, let's compare Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. Facebook was founded in 2004 and currently has over 500 million users. LinkedIn was founded in 2003 and currently has over 80 millions users. LinkedIn has had the "import contacts and spam" since it was first introduced. MySpace was founded in 2003 and currently has 60 million users. Facebook only added the "import contacts and spam" capability within the past two or three years. I have no idea if MySpace has that option because I've never created an account. Did spamming contacts help these sites grow? Of course it helped to some degree. Is it the key to their success? Absolutely not. If Active Social had this feature now would it help your site? Again, to some degree, Yes. Is it going to make your site successful? Absolutely not. Take a look at some blog posts regarding friend spamming:
http://techcrunch.com/2008/02/20/fr...nd-of-all/
http://responsiblemarketing.com/blo...mming-tool
http://gadgetopia.com/post/6154
http://www.jasonmorrison.net/conten...e-systems/

This functionality doesn't make your website viral. I'm a big fan of Seth Godin. Here is a great post from him that covers the basics of "viral".
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_..._an_i.html

The majority of our customers are creating or maintaining communities that cater to a particular niche. I can't think of a single customer site where my entire address book would find the site useful. My address book has over 2,000 contacts. I would never want to import and browse through my entire address book to select contacts that would find a particular site useful.

Let's dig into this a little deeper. I believe that finding people on a site that are in my address book is a very useful feature. A perfect example is a niche site that we are all familiar with, dotnetnuke.com. I would really like to start a DotNetNuke user group in Charleston, SC. I've created the group on DotNetNuke.com, but have only received one person interested in almost 4 years. If I could upload my address book to dotnetnuke.com and have it find matches against the 800k registered users I could start growing the Charleston DotNetNuke User Group immediately. Should that really be necessary? DNN has a database with 800k registered users. They require address information when you registered. DNN.com allowed me to create a "group" for users interested in DotNetNuke from Charleston, SC. What should happen next? Every user that within a 100 mile radius of Charleston, SC should be made aware of my new group the next time they log in or in a "weekly digest" update. One of the keys to any successful website is to make the website do the work, not the end users.

Another key to a successful niche community site is keeping the user engaged. I believe that if you offer an engaging experience to your users they will want to share with others that have the same interest. We are already working on new ways to help make it easier to engage users and maintain interest levels.

Below are the features that I feel are key to the topic of "Creating a Viral AS Website".
1) Displaying related content (groups, users, pages, discussions) based upon user interests.
2) Weekly and Monthly email digest options to provide updates about new content based upon user interests.
3) Improved usability and functionality for sharing content (i.e. Invite Friend, send to friend, post to facebook,etc)
4) Search site users to find related users by importing address book.

If you still really want to import and spam users today, you can do a search on the forums "plaxo" and you will find some posts of how this can be done.

Hi Will, its always good to get a different opinion.

I think "spam" is the wrong word to be using and I disagree with your emphasis on this.

Surely "spam" can only be sent if you can send your own message with it. You would not give users the option to send a message in this case, it would be automated through an email template.

Theres s lot in your post, I need time to digest your post for a bit before I can respond properly!

Thanks for taking the time to respond in detail with a well thought out argument.

While I'm a fan of the "invite" aspect of this, however I really dislike the address book upload/scanning aspect. I'll clarify that by saying I would not, nor will I ever give a third party application access to my address book! There must be a middle ground that is a level playing field without being invasive.

I'm all for an application that can invite users that a group is available based on interest, specific career and location. Will's suggestions appeal to what I would look for and deploy. Not all social sites are public, currently I'm working on a "private" social site for an industry who's entire business is privacy. Here it's not important, but critical that items like address books are off limits.

The idea of a social networking site for medical personal only was a brain-child of a major pharmaceutical company. This site is for healthcare worker who'd love to share information and stories within the healthcare community...not Facebook where their right to privacy is at best a joke.

I can see the value to some site operators to "harvest" users, but there needs to be a way to throttle this feature.

I think we're talking about the differences between "Active" and "Passive" social connections. For the most part...active connections will occur when an existing (or new) member invites people to join them in a network. As Will's post suggests, there needs to be a compelling reason for members to do this. In my case, if someone creates a group for their cycling team or club then asking them to invite other people they know into the group makes sense. They can establish their leadership and social credibility quickly by inviting people into their group during the group creation process.

I join the site
I evaluate the group functionality and decide it's "good" for my team.
I create a group for my team
I invite my "real world" teammates to join. 

First of all I think Active Social is a great product, is clearly well thought out and the functionality is well designed. Well done all at Active Modules.

But at risk of sounding like a heretic, my personal opinion is that the 'invite a friend' functionality is not doing the product any justice and is currently limiting an AS site's growth. I think this is because 'invite a friend' is limited to:

1. groups only
2. being post group creation and effectively hidden away.

By doing this I think it is hard for users to connect with friends and not necessarily intuitive to all users.

We must also bear in mind that not all users will want to create or even join groups (although they may want to browse public groups). They may want to use the site just to network with friends. Therefore having the 'invite a friend' limited to groups ONLY doesn't make sense- its making it difficult for a large proportion of an AS site's users who simply want to connect with friends.

This is a clasic discussion of theory and practice: in theory you could call it "spamming friends", but in practice the ability to easily invite and network with friends WORKS- that's why the big sites use this functionality and ONE reason why they are successful.

Of course there will be some implementations of AS which where this functionality is not required, but this can be controlled through templates, tokens and switches in the control panel, so I don't think this is an argument not to have it.

For those of us that aren't being paid by someone else to create an AS site, why would we do it and why would we buy AS in the first place? Answer, primarily to make money- however you look at it, advertising or subsciptions, it requires a large user base.

I agree AS is for niche markets, but niche doesn't necesarily mean a small user base and niche sites can still generate significant revenue though advertsing or subscriptions, especially because niche sites are targeted at special interest groups where the demographics are well known- very good for advertisers.

If you do add this functionality its about a well thought out implementation which is what you do anyway, so personally I don't see a problem. You could also stage this implementation, you don't have to do it all at once but start with more basic fuctionality first and then develop enhanched features as time permits e.g. "suggested friends" and "mutual friends."

I hope this puts the business case forward, personally I am starting with one Active Social site, if I can generate revenue though advertising from that site I have lots of ideas to do more which will require more licences for you.

However, for me to generate revenue I need a large user base which I think 'invite a friend' functionality though an address books is essential.

Thanks for time all.

Richard, I agree with you. I think the best case scenario would be to all admins as many options as possible as to when and when they want to insert invitations. Ideally....even which solutions they want to provide.

Posted By Will Morgenweck on 04 Nov 2010 10:04 AM

I would really like to start a DotNetNuke user group in Charleston, SC. I've created the group on DotNetNuke.com, but have only received one person interested in almost 4 years.

Oh, I know the problem there. DotNetNuke.com ... 

I know this great third party software suite that you could use to build and maintain a social network-type community ...

Posted By Steven Webster on 05 Nov 2010 09:07 AM
Richard, I agree with you. I think the best case scenario would be to all admins as many options as possible as to when and when they want to insert invitations. Ideally....even which solutions they want to provide.

Yes this would be great Steve.

Would be interested to know if anyone else is interested in more sophisticated 'invite a friend'  functionality detailed above?

It might be worthwhile to post up specific use cases. This can help define a number of "what" we each want to accomplish. Then we can focus on "how" we accomplish it.

I'll start and restate mine:

Members wants to create a group to replace an eGroup for their cycling team, club or group. The typically are already members of the site and belong to several other groups. They create a new group through the wizard. At the end of the process they would typically want to invite their teammates, club members, etc. In some cases...this might be a CSV file of email address from another site (larger clubs), in other cases they want to connect with existing site members and in the last case they have personal email addresses of friend they want to invite.

I would like to see the invitation process incorporated into the last step of the group creation process.

In my case I would like to see keyword or tags assigned to a group at creation. When a new group is created that shares a keyword/tag, a suggestion could be made or invitation could be sent to users who belong to the other group(s) that shares that keyword/tag. Along the lines of "shopper who bought this product also bought...", users who joined this group...

I would like users to be able to find other users of the site from their address list, irrespective of group involvement. Maybe, though, it could show which groups they're part of.

So in addition to the "Active" connections where a member sends out invites to their list of people they know both of these might be more "Passive" connections where we help member with the "Discovery" process through a matched set of criteria that suggests connections:

Similar Groups (based on geo, tags, categories)
Similar Friends (based on geo, groups)
Social Graph (based on friends of friends)

Sounds good.

From a suggestion perspective...what about the concept of networks. A network could be though of as a container for profiles AND groups. For example, I might belong to the "Louisville, KY" network and see other profiles and groups that also belong to that network.

I might also belong to more than one (same for groups). My example is geographic, but it could be IT Professionals or Call Centers or Democrat vs Republican.

Suggestions get a little easier this way.

I do like that, as an optional configuration perhaps? Certainly brings in some LinkedIn or Facebook style functionality.

Have to agree with Will on this one, though I see no problem including the feature in question as long as it can be disabled.  Facebook is what it is because it connects you with people you already know, and many times people you knew at a very emotionally charged time of your life - your school years, it has virtually nothing to do with importing of address book.  What I really wish is for the AS dev team to grow very large and rapidly add every feature and fix every bug including the address book option.  However, in the current situation personally I would choose many other features/enhancements as higher priorities.

Great thread, thanks to all.

In my case, we're targeting 15M US men-in-business going it solo. We know that 3% of them are active 'self-help' consumers. We believe we can build at least a market share of 5%, and an active membership of 10% (facebook#s) with 10% of this group subscribing (craigslist#s & per Seth Godin - Tribes) This digests to a focused, but rather strong group of 'evangelists' which we hope to ask for warm referrals. You can do the numbers and see that monetizing the outcome is critical, and that referrals is the only way for us to really grow.

So, I don't believe our guys are willing to open their contact list until they've established a degree of personal 'trust' (not like facebook chatter) and also technical 'confidence' that they can run an online group and actually invite and lead other guys.

This said, the most critical functions for our site are those that a basic 'non-tech' guy can figure out without 'reading' and that works for him the first time they 'try it out'.

I understand exactly how difficult 'simple, intuitive and effective' is to code. So I'm voting for the 'tags' idea, as well as the 'suggested connection' (people who joined this group also....did, live, buy...) and closely tied to these actions would be a bullet-proof 'refer 1-3 friends' function, but not much more than that (yeah right)

Awesome thread, great posts and great reply Will. May i add to your list:
5) Like button (or better yet AS-admin-definable buttons) - Plus journaling of each Like to allow likes to go viral within your AS site.

I would add to the idea of 'like' that it be implemented as a widget or code snippet that can be placed anywhere (within your AS module, on other modules (Property Agent, News Articles) on other DNN pages or even on other sites.

I think you guys are overlooking one of the most powerful ways to build a community. Reward System.

Look at all these Facebook apps and even modern games. You get a trophy for this or a badge for that. This drives people because each little reward is a sense of accomplishment.

What if there was a reward system for # of posts or # of friends? People would hit the first tier and feel like "Wow, I got a shiny badge!" Let me aim for level 2.

Games like mafia wars take this to another level because they also tie the accomplishments into their system as requirements. ie. You can't buy that weapon until you have 100 friends, so you start inviting people like mad.

This is really way more potent than email spamming your contacts list because it gets people involved in your niche not just some random people who get annoyed.

The question is, does this make sense for AS/AF and how would you impelment it. If Will does implement it, I respectfully suggest to make it extendable with custom badges and accomplishments for non AS/AF accomplishments.

Currently I have hacked this into my site. You can see an example of it here:

http://activeforums.s3.amazonaws.com/afbadges.jpg

in the forums, I also have a way for a user to quick view the badges for the post authors:

http://activeforums.s3.amazonaws.com/userinfo.jpg

The key is to determine what you can make for achievements beyond the forum and active social. For example, if you do a bike club, maybe you can have a reward for miles ridden, etc.

A rewards system is coming in AS 2.0 complete with an API. However, rewards is more of a system for retention of existing members, not viral growth. We should probably start another topic related to rewards and retention.