What does it mean to reduce friction? They minified their Flash app from 1 MB to 0.45 MB and don't require user accounts.
little frictions add up.
our goal was to build a viral application and our approach was to have far less friction than our competitors. it worked because our top traffic source was direct traffic.
when you bring up the word "viral", the knee jerk reaction was to integrate with twitter. the reality is that asking permission to someone's twitter feed actually add a lot friction. that's the point we are trying to bring across.
as for the bloggers, if you read the article, you would see that we didn't reach out to bloggers and journalists. we simply reduced the friction for bloggers to covers us by providing a dedicated press faq page along with all the collaterals, and a free premium license.
The main selling points of their premium version are user support and access to a desktop version. If they have 'reduced friction' for their online version, the need for support should be negligent and the downloadable version less attractive. As freemium models go, I think thy need to differentiate better.