One major issue you might face with a social platform hosting applications that leverage a user’s social profiles, friendships, and activities has to do with the nature of the social graph these applications are building.

As a social platform creator, you want your users to add friends or connections that have some relationship significance to them. In other words, you want to be able to use a user’s relationships and connections to grow the platform; for example, by:

Basically, you want to gain as much as possible from a user’s simple interactions with his friends and with the platform itself.

Now, if you don’t have these relationships to begin with and you start introducing social games that require players to add friends to progress, then you get into a particular predicament. A user who lacks the existing relevant connections will seek out other people who play the game but may otherwise have no shared interests or relationship to the user. This creates a graph that’s relevant within the game itself (since the users have direct interactions in one way or another every time they play) but almost entirely unusable for the rest of the platform.

To complicate matters, it’s difficult for a user to move from an irrelevant graph to a relevant one by adding friends and connections, because his profile is already filled with people he doesn’t really know on a personal level. For many people (not all, of course), this prospect would make them hesitant to interact socially and share information about themselves with perfect strangers.

Facebook is one example that has succeeded in building relevance in its social graphs while introducing social applications to its users. The important thing to remember here is that Facebook became known as a social engagement platform long before it served applications. Building up your user base prior to launching social applications—thus focusing your attention on social engagements—can greatly improve the relevance of the social graph that users construct on your platform.