Dan is a 22 year old graduate student in the Management Science & Engineering program at Stanford University. After finishing his undergraduate degree in Economics at Stanford last Spring he joined a small team in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, working closely for the past year with BJ Fogg.

Dan is the cofounder and CEO of a viral marketing and new media consulting company called The Comotion Group. They focus on seeding viral videos online and have achieved over 20MM views for their clients in the past 3 months. Lately, they have also begun to consult with clients on Facebook strategy, proposing application ideas and working with clients to design and launch effective FB apps.

Dan has also founded another company with three other Stanford students - IdeaCV - and they opened it to the public just two weeks ago. With IdeaCV, they want to provide a a forum for social brainstorming, a safe haven for creative thinkers and entrepreneurs to share ideas openly.

Today I have asked Dan about the “Creating Engaging Facebook Apps” course that they are running at Stanford. This is the first time the course has run because the Facebook Developer platform only launched 5 months ago. Students will work in teams to create two Facebook apps and will learn what elements lead to a viral application.

Why was Facebook chosen as the development platform, why not just create normal websites?

The Persuasive Tech lab studies how technology can be designed to change people’s behavior. This year, we believe that Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology, and the goal of the class is to understand what makes it tick.

We believe that by putting 85 of the smartest Stanford students in one room, we will provide insight into the psychology of Facebook. The goal of the course is not just to understand Facebook, but to understand how developers can design, launch, and iterate on applications built on top of any social network, be it Facebook, MySpace, Google, LinkedIn, or any other platform that opens up in the future.

Students in Computer Science degrees have traditionally been taught how to write applications, what will the Facebook App environment teach them that they previously wouldn’t have learned?

Because the Facebook platform allows an application to seamlessly tap into the Facebook user database, developers can now build applications that ride on top of a user’s pre-existing social graph. In other words, application developers can design experiences that leverage a Facebook user’s individual social network without worrying about rebuilding a social network in a standalone web app.

We are realizing that we may be at the tip of a new era of internet applications, where we may find developers choosing to launch applications inside of pre-existing social networks, rather than as standalone internet applications. In this class, our students are learning how to take a step back from the traditional web app model and design engaging web apps that ride on top of a user’s existing friend network.

What types of applications are students working on?

All apps will be launching alpha versions by next week, but a few students have already launched live versions of their apps. The goal of the first project is broad - to grow an app using viral strategies. The second project is more focused, as we have asked students to build apps related to education.

Here are links to a few of our students’ live apps, as of today: Freeloans, Kiss Me, My Tournaments, Good Eats.

There has been a lot of recent discussion about Facebook app monetization - is it likely that any students will make money from the course, and how will the students be graded?

If our students find a way to monetize their apps during the 10 week class, we’d be thrilled, but it is not part of the grading criteria. We are grading students on how many users they draw into their apps, how engaged these users are, and how well our students respond to feedback and metrics to iterate on their apps as the quarter progresses.

At the end of the day, we’re hoping that students can see through the grades and realize that regardless of the grade they get, they will have built and launched two Facebook applications in 10 weeks!

Your colleague Dave McClure said “We don’t want people to read case studies, we want people to build case studies.” Will any of the course content be published online?

Yes, we have the course website up and we will continue to update the site as the course progresses. We’ve also set up a blog to publish class updates, insights, and weekly class summaries.

We realize that this course is the first of its kind, so we are definitely learning as we go. Ideally, our experience with the class will help to motivate and inspire instructors and students at other schools around the world to design similar classes. At the end of this class, e hope to share our curriculum with anyone who is interested. We’ve seen quite a lot of interest from outside the classroom and from students at other schools, so I’d be very surprised if we didn’t see similar classes offered at other institutions next semester!

Thanks Dan. You can now try the first round of Stanford student apps.

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Posted on October 22nd, 2007 by Ross