Ask HN: can a web 2.0 app succeed without social media integration?
say I'm working on a web app which has features that make it useful as a standalone product (i.e., it doesn't obtain its value from a community element or some sort of integration of user data from external sites). is it a must to have some sort of facebook/twitter/blog/whatever integration at launch to have a shot at success? it's obviously a bit of work to write and manage code hitting various external APIs, so I'd like to avoid it if I don't think it's a useful feature. I just wonder if not having this integration is some sort of sign to user that it's an amateurish product.
I admit I'm a bit biased, because I make very little use of social networking sites, so I'm not sure how to assess the value of these features. I can see potential value in terms of free advertising, e.g. pushing activity updates from my service to a user's twitter stream. but I just don't know how to guess whether anyone would actually use these features.<p>I know the answer is "maybe", but just wanted to get some opinions, or examples/counter-examples.
Without knowing the target audience of the product, or the actual product itsself, it is difficult to say whether people would use these features and whether your site would benefit from having them or be at a disadvantage by not having them.
I think there are plenty of cases where social networking sites are unnecessary, even in a community... for example there isn't a 'post to twitter or fb' on stackoverflow every time you answer a question, the value is in the site its self. However there are many other sites that gain a little something extra by either having the option to authorize a login or share activity through social media (i.e. i think it's cool that pandora tells me that a friend likes an aritst when i'm listening).
Can you tell us a little more about the target market and maybe a little more about what the web app does... saying that it's "web 2.0" is pretty cliche and says absolutely nothing about the actual product.
also, to the point of the bit of work to write and manage code hitting the various external API's... most times the developers for these organizations have created well documented API's and code samples for simple implementation of their features on other sites... so it's not like you're reinventing the wheel (although facebook has caught some flak on here for the way they up and changed basically everything about their api and authentication and whatnot when they implemented the social graph, but I've worked with it a little and it doesn't seem that bad).