Make Users Invest

There are a lot web services out there. Some of them are used frequently, others are easily forgotten. The thing that makes me come back to a service most though, is if I have invested time in it. Take Last.fm for example. Through the past years (since august 2004) I have accumulated more than 80 000 songs submitted. There is no way that I will switch to a different, similar service. Another example is Foobar2000. This horrible (from a usability point of view) program took me hours to configure but the result is that I probably won’t switch to a different media player, I would feel that the time spent changing it was wasted. If you can get your users to, somehow, invest time in your service, preferably through (easy) customization, you have a higher probability that they will return. This might also explain why Myspace has been such a success. The users are allowed to customize their entire page, plus as added bonus they spend time accumulating a social network, minimalizing the chance that they might switch to an alternative service.