Making the rounds on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr right now is Three Words, a super simple but mighty fun application created by teen tinkerer Mark Bao. What does it do?
Well, it tells you who you are in three words, at least according to the people that visit that Web page, that is.
When you first go to the site, you can sign up through Facebook Connect, and you’ll get a link that looks like this: http://threewords.me/robinwauters. On that page, people can describe you in – you guessed it – three words, and you can even customize your page with a personal background and avatar if you’re into that.
On Hacker News, meanwhile, Bao explains how he built the app, and asked the community what he should do now. Evidently, Bao also took to Quora, where he explained how the simple Web app went from a simple link on Facebook to a viral machine.
He says the biggest growth so far has come from Twitter and Tumblr, and also from Facebook, and that he’s built the app specifically to spread virally by incorporating a low enough barrier to entry as well as a mechanism to entice people who describe other people to make a Three Words page for themselves too.
And of course, everyone knows people love to know what other people think of them (you can do so anonymously on Three Words, by the way, so go wild on my profile if you wish).
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Funnily enough, he could easily make the service even more viral, in my opinion, by simply adding some buttons so people can easily spread their custom profile link to various social networking services once they’ve signed up.
Lets hope the site stays in the air long enough for you to try it out – there are definitely some scaling issues that need to be resolved.
