What is the most addictive feature you've encountered?

Question

Hi I'm Gene and I'm an addict.

I often find my self addicted to a website and I'm quite sure I'm not alone. So my question is what is the most addictive Web-site/appplication/feature you've encountered.

And before someone closes this question as irrelevant I'd like to point out that the result will help all of us to build websites that gets the users to coming back for more.

My own answer for the website would be the Game Travian. I've been playing for almost 2 years no. As features go the stackoverflows reputation system, is quite addictive.

Answer 1

StackOverflow of course! 8-)

p.s.

seeing "subjective" & "polls" tags makes my hand to move mouse to "close" button.

Answer 2

The most "addictive" feature I've seen in any web app - at least insofar as it's meant I expect to see it in all others - is the "click-through" on photo albums on Facebook. Since joining and using FB, I've often found myself on other apps (like Flickr) clicking on the main photo and expecting to be advanced to the next one in the stream.

Answer 3

Frequent updates and user interaction / comments.

It's like, "I'll just click the refresh button one more time before doing some work ;-)"

Answer 4

I dont know other people like it or not but my addictive website is IGOOGLE which happens to be my home page too.

Answer 5

The most addictive feature I know of is 'Intellisense' - I now find myself trying to use it in all applications, then cursing because it doesn't work.

It's flipping annoying that it doesn't work in the SQL editor of Visual Studio, when it works for the .NET editor of Visual Studio. (Maybe it's in VS 2008?)

Answer 6

I'll second @Rob's click-through comment. First experienced on Hot or not, it brought an entire department to it's knees due to the the fact that there was no out, apart from closing the browser - judging a pic hot or not automatically loaded the next one.

Answer 7

Anything that means you gain points/badges for doing stuff...

I think this is the king of thing that makes people spend time when they don't need to. It's much like the achievement whores that your get with consoles, who will do anything to get a high gamer score.

Answer 8

Incremental search in emacs. How can anybody live without it?