College students and marketing droids have things in common they aren't too keen on working very hard, and they overestimate how stupid everyone else on earth is.

Viral marketing is actually a strategy in itself, whereby you set out from the start to get your message out using an existing network of friends or email contacts. The strategy can be used for its relative low cost or to lend credibility to the campaign among a chosen market segment (e.g. youth). The key to success is in making the message attractive to people so that they naturally want to share it with their network of friends/colleagues/family. It works in the same way as those relentless poems, funny pictures or video clips and chain letters. Indeed, it works in a similar fashion to a worm, only with the consensual collaboration of the “infected.”

A viral marketing campaign would start out with one of those meetings where they decide to use viral marketing. It should not be an afterthought.

This would explain a lot about most Facebook apps.

As soon as Microsoft buys up Facebook or whatever else, it'll be one social graph to rule them all sooner than you can blink.

Ballmer will have the kind of relation in a category, and you'll be using MS's site for every kind. LinkedIn will die because all .NET developers and all MCSEs will all want to be on it to better find a colleague or to be reassured by the number of others of their kind in existence.

And we'll be able to rant about how MS holds yet another monopoly on top of Outlook, IE and Windows.

Isn't this a wonderful world ?

So if someone attaches your name to a Facebook object, then it notifies everyone on your friends list? So what this really does is leverage the power of harassment and spam, no?