community next: embrace the chaos

Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

Trisha Okubo, Choon Chong and Sunny Li from eBay's Platform & Innovation team attended the Community Next conference in early October, a Silicon Valley event about social network platforms. It turned out to be a hands-on lesson in how to create a viral community application. Choon entered the conference’s Iron Coder competition, where he was tasked to build a Facebook application and recruit as many users as possible — all within 24 hours.

Read the full post on eBay's Innovation blog as Trisha and Sunny re-cap their learnings from the event and 3 top tips for building a truly viral app (Gesundheit!) like ForeignPoke about how to create a viral application. What is ForeignPoke? This Facebook app allows you to do stuff to your friends in the language of your choice. So—you can smack your friends in German, kiss them in French, or bite them in Italian.

At the 24 hour mark, ForeignPoke, was far from first place (with 25 users to the winner's 147)—and the $5,000 prize.(It seems that the friends we contacted to add the application don’t check e-mail on Friday night.)But now, less than 2 weeks later, ForeignPoke has grown on it’s own to over 2,000 users, and an ardent fan even volunteered to translate the actions into his native Swedish!