Do You Like iLike?

It seems like everywhere I turn I'm reading about how fast the iLike application is growing on Facebook. In about two week's time they have garnered over 3 million users on the site. It is currently the second most popular application. I am not one of those 3 million, but many of my friends are. I don't plan to speak for the application, as I don't know if it is good, bad, or what. I'm more interested in the speed in which it is growing, and the amount of attention it has received. Its growth rate, as has been mentioned a number of times, is largely due to the viral nature of Facebook's applications. When someone adds one, an entry is added to their mini-feed and posted to their friends' main feeds (depending on settings). This means that if you have a good number of friends, the simple act of adding an application advertises it to a large number of people. On top of this, these are not just ads that are on the side of the screen. These have your implicit endorsement, which means other people are more likely to add them as well. If they do add them, it is posted to their feeds, and just propagates out. This means that in a matter of a few hours, thousands of people can potentially see an application multiple times simply because one person added it.
The rabid adoption rate is a double edged sword. In iLike's case, they outgrew their servers very quickly, and had to scramble to get more. If you don't have the ability to scale exponentially in a very short amount of time, you're screwed. On the other hand, it means that the time it takes to make it big can be cut drastically. If you have something that you can monetize, the lead time for it will be shorter. This is definitely a good thing.
There is something interesting here, though. How quickly will the saturation point be reached? When the growth rate is practically a straight line going up, it is near impossible to keep that up for long. Not for any fault on the application's part, but simply because they run out of people. This means that once they hit this point, there is no way to grow other than to offer new things to existing users. When your growth rate is slower, you have more time to plan for this, and to roll things out to keep people interested. Will something like iLike be able to do the same on a faster basis? Will they need to? People can be finicky, and like things that are new and interesting. If everyone is using the application from day one, I would think that a boredom factor would begin to set in. The novelty factor can only carry on for so long. Is it possible that iLike will get the same grace period as other apps that take longer to become popular? I am really curious, I have no idea. Part of me wants to think that this thing could skyrocket up, and then be forgotten within a few months. The other part of me thinks that they will be able to keep people interested long enough to offer something else. Either way, it will be interesting to see what happens. Their growth can only go on for so long (after all, there are only so many Facebook users), but I imagine there will be a while longer where we see this happening.
The other interesting part of all of this is the coverage that this is getting. The success of iLike is being told and re-told, and will likely serve as a blueprint. The coverage also just helps to drive more people to look into what iLike is, and what other applications Facebook has to offer. It also is making sites like MySpace scramble to come up with something to compete. This is all free publicity for both Facebook, their new platform, and applications like iLike. It is definitely the hot topic right now.

All of this is pretty exciting stuff. I'll continue to read about it and pass along info. Also, I share a lot on Facebook that I don't necessarily write about on here so take a look at my posted items there for some more info.