Cogblog

Everyone in the office is abuzz with talk of fmylife.com.  Fmylife has skyrocketed to the top of traffic statistics in a very short period of time.

Fmylife is a remarkably simple application.  There are only three things you can do on the site:

1. Read stories
2. Vote that the person deserved or did not deserve the terrible thing that happened to them
3. Submit a one paragraph story that starts with “Today, ” and ends with “FML”

The design has two images: a “new” icon next to new FMLs and a “share this” icon.

So this is not popular because it has a sleek web 2.0 design or some amazing functionality.  Almost any Rails developer could probably code the entire site in a couple of days.  This was simply good execution of an idea and effective development of the concept as a marketing meme.  Amazingly, when you look at technorati, there haven’t been a lot of major blog posts about fmylife to date and not even a substantial amount of long-tail blog posts.

What made for great execution?  The barrier to participation is remarkably low.  Voting is a simple click with no login.  Submitting a story involves giving yourself a nickname, picking a category, and writing a sentence.  With barriers this low, it is easy for even casual readers to get involved – and many do!

We can also look at the ranks relative to other web sites:

Wow, FML is as big a hit as MSNBC. I bet it costs a lot less to build and run. It grew faster than Hulu and Hulu had the best content licenses in the history of the Internet.

A great example of the power of a great idea.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Theories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.