What multi-platform means for viral loops

trigger.io

34 points·amirnathoo··5 comments

How do you account for the success of Instagram, which has been iPhone only for over a year?

Is it their API that has enabled web-based add ons? Or the simplicity of the app and the ease of use?

If you click through any of these links: https://twitter.com/#!/search/instagr.am

You'll be taken to a rich web experience that allows even non-iPhone users to engage and in turn share with friends via Twitter.

So Instagram has done both the web and iPhone really well which has been enough for them.

The title lead me to believe this was an amazingly clever way for a phone and pc to infect each other making it more challenging to remove viruses.

In a way, it kind of is, but not in the way i was expecting.

Interesting idea, but it seems to assume that a cross-platform strategy is free. In reality, it's likely to consume a non-negligible amount of time. If you can avoid that, then I'm sure it's a big gain, but if it delays your initial release substantially, I'd wager that's at least as likely to harm your potential "virality" as releasing earlier but on a single platform.

A slight increase in "virality" can make the difference in the success/failure of an app - surely worth a small increase in time. In reality, frameworks like Trigger.io make it straightforward to access native functionality in a few lines of Javascript and it's much quicker to iterate on a single codebase; so (particularly) the ongoing time/cost should be less than native development.

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