Holiday Reading

I caught up with some reading on my recent holiday in France. Amongst the non-fiction books that I enjoyed most was Viral Loop by Adam Penenberg.  He gives good background information on the origins of some web successes such as Facebook, MySpace, PayPal and Hotmail. The common thread is the importance of virality in the context of marketing and growing these companies. Penenberg draws parallels with pre-internet companies such as Tupperware which shows viral marketing is nothing new.  According to Penenberg, one of the key problems for companies that achieve viral success is scaling the infrastructure to meet the rapidly growing demand and not lose customers from outage problems e.g. Friendster.  I suppose I have a bit of a problem with the viral metaphor as it only goes so far. In nature a virus is often a malign force that eventually burns itself out when it runs out of hosts or when the host community develops an immunity. When you start thinking in those terms then the metaphor is less attractive as a business model. At the end of the day it comes down to word of mouth. If you've got a good product or service people will tell others and the internet offers a great platform for doing that. I think the author is rather fatalistic about privacy in chapter 12. I believe there will be a rebalancing of privacy expectations and a backlash againgst Facebook and others as users realise the longer term implications of sharing their private lives on such networks. Overall, a good read for anyone wanting to learn more about the dynamics and challenges of building an internet business.