The EC SuperScrap Application on Orkut continues to grow in popularity, fetching over one million page views everyday. That translates to over 30M+ page-views per month, on a single application alone.

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Quoting Umair Haque “Across consumer markets, attention is becoming the scarcest - and so most strategically vital - resource in the value chain ”

So, in the social media world, where consumers are increasingly affected with ADD (attention deficit disorder), how do you buy his attention? Using social currency, of course. “Social currency is like a good joke”, explains Douglas Rushkoff. When a bunch of friends sit around and tell jokes, what are they really doing? Entertaining one another? Sure for a start. But they are also using content — mostly unoriginal content that they have heard somewhere else — in order to lubricate a social occasion. The joke itself is the social currency.

This post is just an example of how I am using social currency (games, widgets and quotes), all unoriginal and for free, to desperately get your attention. Go Fish!

Application Ideators need to test clarity of purpose before casting their product requirements to engineering. An application is best designed to either cater to a single user or to a group, delivering fun OR serving some utility. Try a mix of purposes and your application will most often fall in the clouded middle (of the grid shown below) and fail to get adopted.

At EC we always design Apps for the extremeties.