What Stanford Learned Building Facebook Apps

Some of this may be specific to Facebook "apps" ... but, then again, many of these points can easily be applied to "traditional" application development as well. (And should be.) From ReadWriteWeb:

Dr. BJ Fogg and Dave McClure taught a class last semester at Stanford on Building Facebook Applications. In 10 weeks, the 80 students had created 50+ applications and in total had over 20 Million installs - with 5 having more than 1 million users.

At today's Graphing Social Patterns conference, BJ and his two teacher assistants shared 10 tips they learned from the experience. Here they are:

1. It's never too late to create a winning app
2. Simplicity & clarity are key to app success
3. Aim for speed & flexibility in launch and iterations
4. Community cooperation leads to success (in other words, the most successful students shared the most)
5. Individual opinion about apps are worthless, you need to get out there and see what happens
6. Copying success is a cheap / fast way to succeed
7. Metrics do matter, but today's tools are too weak
8. You CAN learn to create a winning app
9. Success comes from the CHAOS / CONTROL Cycle
10. Mass Interpersonal Persuasion is finally here