(Extracts from my humble blog: http://www.some-tech-stuff.blogspot.com/)

Something strucked me during Rockyou Ro Choy's widget monetization presentation yesterday when that if you don't build an application that is *inherently* viral (in order to deploy it on a social network), you shouldn't even bother to build it. And it is right. If you look at some applications deployed on Facebook, you'd see that there is no *inherent* interaction between users and you'd see that the number of users is pretty low. Like Ro said "people want to communicate with each other, they want to connect and to share" (something like that) so the app has to be built on/with this. As an example, on Facebook, you'd find apps that generate quotes (from philosophers, from Woody Allen and so on). Those apps are cute but in regard of the *viral principle* exposed by Ro, those apps seem to be somehow outdated and the (very low) number of users seem to confirm this.

Being from entreprise (National Bank of Canada), I'm always trying to find/understand ways to introduce Web 2.0 in entreprise in, this part being key, a useful way. Let's be honest, it's a problem, people seems to be too busy to collaborate!!! So, thinking about this viral principle, in the context of entreprise brings us back to... collaboration, at least in an unconscious way.

When you look at some of your corporate emails, more than often, people are looking for information. And more than often, they don't *exactly* know who to ask for this information, who can help them. So, you often receive emails like I'm looking for this and that, can you provide the answer or forward this request to someone in your team that can be of any help. It's like they would be building a puzzle and the're looking for a missing piece.

So, if you transpose this in a social net context, you'd have a feed exposed to someone's net (group of friends/colleagues) stating that this person is looking for this and that.The missing part is the incentive for someone to provide this information. And then, you could go either way: positive or negative (conditionning).

So, you'd have the request and the rewarding mecanism to get response to this request. Is something missing? Probably yes. At the bank, we have discussion threads where people can enter questions and other can answer. Are they used? Not at all. People just don't have time to look at this. So the next step would probably be on the UI front: a *contextual* tag cloud or graph that let user see what is needed.

Hmmm... food for thoughts while flying back home tonight