One of the core principles that many of the successful Facebook apps share is an aspect of immediate engagement. You add the app, and BANG, you’re prompted to do something: review a movie, bite a friend, give a gift, etc.
There’s no passive waiting for a user to browse through your app’s pages and figure out what they want to do.
Indeed, on their excellent list of Social App Design best practices, OpenSocial lists “Engage Quickly” as number one.
It seems that most destination websites take a more passive approach. The website sits there with its tens, hundreds, thousands, and millions of pages and waits for the user to initiate the engagement.
Facebook itself – as well as many of its competitors in the social networking space – take a somewhat more aggressive approach. When you join Facebook, you’re immediately prompted to “find your friends,” which of course, is also a neat way to lead the user towards inviting friends who are not already on the network. This immediate engagement leading to batch, friend driven invitations would seem to be a huge factor in how quickly social networks have grown in relation to more static, less social websites.
It seems to me that MANY destination websites could do a better job of driving immediate engagement, and it doesn't necessarily have to involve inviting friends.
Does anybody have any examples of non social networking sites that do a good job of initiating immediate engagement?
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