This story gets it backward. Jack Smith came up with that idea. Sabeer Bhatia makes this explicitly clear in <i>Founders At Work</i>.<p>I'm surprised nobody here has mentioned it yet.<p><i>Livingston: You had a tagline in the body of the email encouraging email recipients to set up their own free Hotmail accounts. How did you come up with
this?<p>Bhatia: It was actually Jack’s idea to do that. We ran it by our VCs just to make sure it was OK. When you alter somebody’s email, you’ve got to be very careful.
You’re sending an email to a friend of yours, and we are kind of violating the sanctity of that email by putting in a tagline at the end of it that says “This message has been sent from Hotmail. Get your free email at hotmail.com.”
So we asked Tim if it was OK that we did this. We said, “We don’t want to be perceived as the evil company by altering their email.” And he said, “Absolutely, you should do it.”
And the next thing we know, he claims that this idea was his. He’s given a number of interviews literally claiming that he was the father of web-based email — without him it would not have happened. I can’t believe he’s just taken
credit for everything — including the tagline (which later became known as the classic example of viral marketing). He blatantly claims this at conferences, which I don’t think is right.<p>Livingston: He claimed that web-based email was his idea?<p>Bhatia: That it was our idea, but without them, it would not have happened and that we would have done JavaSoft. Their version is that “we told them to do web-based email at that [first] meeting.” Why would they tell us to do web-
based email?</i>
They still do this, too. I got an email from someone using Hotmail a few days ago and this was appended to the bottom:<p><pre><code> Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
Your E-mail and More On-the-Go. Get Windows Live Hotmail Free. Sign up now.
Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.
</code></pre>
I kid you not, 5 lines. Something tells me that they're getting desperate.
Ok, so "the power of viral loops" basically amounts to:<p>1) Spend time and effort build your product
2) Give it away for free
3) Embed a tagline into the product so that users are "involuntary salespeople"
4) ???
5) Profit!<p>There isn't really anything new here. Applying viral marketing is trivially easy for email, or other social-media apps (which is not to say it will work, just that's it's a natural fit). What I would like to see is an analysis on how to adapt viral loops to non-social settings. How would someone like LifeLock.com apply this message, for example?
> The following is an excerpt from Adam L. Penenberg’s new book<p>N.B. The journalist who exposed Steven Glass -- <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Penenberg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Penenberg</a>
For the business in this crowd:<p>Does this approach yield similar results for you? I could imagine iPhone applications spreading this way (much like those damn Facebook quizzes), but what about for more specialized markets?
As smart as it was, I have yet to find some software that adds tags to the messages that I don't hate. Mostly because the kind of software that does stuff like that isn't the kind of software I would want to use - but it is pushed on me anyway.<p>Even the mail stuff in my Ipod Touch does that by default (I turned it off, but but that isn't going to do much for the stuff I receive).