Patina is the surface appearance of something grown beautiful especially with age or use. A lived-in kitchen, a Leica camera, a leather jacket—they were all once brand spanking new but they all get better with time. Scratches and stains symbolize memories and experiences, and they build up on a durable, perpetually relevant item to create character, or patina.

In the digital world, patina is a key hurdle to product success. Unlike the lifecycle of a physical object, Internet users don’t want to buy into something when it’s new. New online services come and go at hyper-speed, and simultaneously, millions of users are sifting through these products deciding whether or not to use them. If a user lands on a blog with no comments, a social network with no users, a store with no user reviews, they’re apt to move on to places already deemed valuable by mass participation such as Amazon, Facebook and Twitter. In the digital space, it’s essential for products to develop patina as fast as possible, as early as possible in their lifecycles. Without patina, no one would pick a digital product up from the shelf. It’s the barrier to success in an environment where there’s almost no barrier to entry.

It all comes down to understanding real world human behavior. If a friend invites you over dinner and has a brand new, modern shiny kitchen, you may hesitate before asking to help. It’s too clean. You don’t want to mess it up. But on the other hand, if the kitchen is a little scruffy here and there, it’s easy to offer a hand. Or say you had to choose between a restaurant filled with people and an empty one down the block that just opened. My bet is you’d choose the popular one. This is the concept of digital patina.

Digital patina comes in the form of populated message boards, article comments, product reviews, the tally of a weight loss communities’ number of pounds lost, the lists of email addresses of past recipients embedded in email forwards. Social media has a particularly apparent patina. Just like a scratch on a sofa represents an event and a memory, every photo, poke and update on Facebook represents an experience, a moment. Accordingly, each social networking account has its own individual patina. Someone who has been on Facebook for five years with 800 friends has developed a different patina than a user signed up for an account last week and has 50 friends.

When developing new digital products, it’s essential to implement strategies that rapidly develop patina. Fortunately this could become easier to achieve. One type of tool that significantly helps develop patina is Facebook Connect and similar services. They can instantly bring elements of digital patina, like friends, photos and comments, to a brand new product. Patina may also become easier to develop as privacy walls continue to erode and consumers rely increasingly on applications. The more digital traces we leave, the more patina we create.

The original article was published on www.notesondigital.com.