that said, i don’t think you should be TOO hard on email-driven notification / retention — i agree that organic retention is much more desirable, but achieving that via great user experience is probably orthogonal (or at least not mutually exclusive) wrt email retention.

otoh, i think you’re spot on to spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage high-value active users, whether via emotional or economic rewards.

one additional thought: many times people tend to split the audience into only 2 groups: readers & content-creators. actually, i think it’s useful to consider splitting them into 3 groups:
* readers = visit your site & read stuff
* creators = visit your site & create stuff
* pimps = visit your site & “pimp” stuff out

what i think many people miss is that often the pimps are higher value than the creators, and that your incentive structures should actually emphasize the “pimps” over the “creators” (note: this may also assume you have already incentivized creators to get to minimum critical mass of content).

anyway, just a thought.

I run a group dating site and this is the kind of thing we talk about often. At the end of this most recent post you start to get into the concept of deep vs. shallow apps on Facebook, and I really think that as the viral channels close up (and they’ve been closing very quickly as notifications are getting spammier and Facebook is cracking down on them), then I think that ultimately the only apps left standing will be ones that offer a significant value to the user, or as you say, deep apps. I wrote something about this back in March on our blog:
http://ignighter.com/blog/2008/03/31/its-not-i-have-a-dream-but-its-something/

Keep up the great work Andrew!

excellent post my friend!!! I was happy to see that we built our site very much inline with most of your suggestions regarding notifications.

We are currently building our widget for OS & FB so, it was great to hear some thoughts on that as well.

Thank you!

I couldn’t agree with you more on the home surface. I see much better retention on MySpace apps than on Facebook, because of the home surface that MySpace gives you. As an app publisher, you can push fresh content through there to keep folks engaged.

On a separate note, I can’t stress enough the “Build features that support high-quality single-user experiences” as a means of bridging from low to high community usage and engagement.

This post was an eye-opener for me. In fact many of your posts are Any plans to turn all these posts & conversations into a good book on marketing 2.0 ?