There are many contributing factors to Apple’s success. Go to an Apple fanboy forum if you want to hear about them. See you in a few years. But one thing that they do exceptionally well is hype. Hype turns into conversation. Conversation turns into consumption. For example:

On Wednesday, Apple gave their keynote on the upcoming new product developments. Keep in mind that these keynotes are the subject of a huge amount of rumours and speculation. Some of the new features included iTunes 9, iPod Nano with camera and new iPod pricing. The next day all features available globally and in full. This meant that their biggest fans could take in all the changes and immediately experience them. Thus, Apple’s biggest influencers continued talking about them and the positive/negative changes. It kept the conversation flowing and cascading down to the less fanatical but still interested consumers.

In contrast, today Facebook announced the new feature @ replies in order to take on Twitter. In their blog post they are “rolling this feature out over the course of the next few weeks, so you may not see the new feature just yet”. Despite this being a pretty big announcement which has been anticipated for some time, here’s what people were talking about…

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