really? i did not know that!

As you may know, Fred is involved with Twitter.

Yes, but that’s not at all what I had in mind.Or: (A) for much of entrepreneurship on the Internet, ‘viral’ growth is from important up to very important up to just crucial. (B) Viral growth can be so fast and valuable that it is astounding and for some of entrepreneurship, astoundingly important. (3) People interested in such entrepreneurship should understand such viral growth. (4) In understanding viral growth, we might, likely we should, approach it, should work until we can effectively approach it, quantitatively — i.e., money is quantitative.I’m not in the least interested in selling anything about viral growth. Instead, I’m just trying to understand, hopefully effectively quantitatively, viral growth. Why? I want to do better with viral growth for my project.Right, viral growth would be a topic in mathematical sociology, that is, my wife’s Ph.D., but as AVC knows well, she died.Part of what sociology can do is ‘social theory’, that is, soft, intuitive, non-scientific, non-mathematical guesses about what the heck is going on. My wife was good at such stuff; some of her girlfriends were astoundingly good at it, or, at least could effortlessly, rapidly spout off lots of such theories with a lot of ‘face validity’. Such theories are not science but maybe are a crucial seed for science, that is, something to be pursued, understood, and tested. So, we could use some intuitive social theories about viral growth. Or, right, we’re talking ‘social media’ here, right? Or we’re talking ‘social phenomena’.My software development sufficient to go live, and in some important ways more, really is rapidly coming to an end, so that coming at me like a 100 MPH freight train rolling down the Wasatch is how to pick some ‘entering wedges’ that can have good viral growth. So, I’m interested in viral growth.Now in my little differential equation, that came from assuming that (A) current users talked to (B) potential users. That potentially complicated situation boiled down to just one number, the constant k, and that should be good news. That is, whatever we do to stimulate viral growth should, at least with that equation, boil down to just k. So, we’re trying to grow k. If we do something, then the results should show in k. If we can increase k by, say, 10%, then with the solution to the equation we can find the ROI for what we did — that could be valuable in deciding what to do, i.e., what to devote viral growth marketing resources.For a start, on the ‘social theory’, we might look at how on SoundCloud, SnapChat, PInterest, Facebook, Google, etc. current users communicated to potential users. Likely some of the communications was via gossip among teenage girls, but there have to be other important communications also.Yes, ‘network effects’ will be important. And we’re talking something like the old ‘word of mouth advertising’. We need to learn from those but also need more.

Charts as a mode of discovery seem so yesterday. Money ($999) and the capacity to promote (or not) distort charts. Thus, charts are (and will be) filled with major label content. Fans and emerging artists need a magic box that can put fresh, unpromoted, ‘quality’ songs directly into the ears of receptive fans. Charts built off of social traction data can’t do this…

Potentially. It might only be valuable to so few though it’s not monetizable or perhaps they wouldn’t want to divulge how that data is monetizable. It makes me wonder too if once you spot a pattern if it’s too late because the person or people behind someone or something’s success already know what they’re doing – so why would they pay for that information? Not sure who you’d sell to. I do understand some value that could come from it – could be quite the fun experimental project to work on too.