How we created a Twitter viral: the ePenis story(barryborsboom.wordpress.com)

25 pointsby daveambrosevor 17 Jahren13 comments

barryborsboom.wordpress.com

How we created a Twitter viral: the ePenis story

http://barryborsboom.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/how-we-created-a-twitter-viral/

5 comments

jballancvor 17 Jahren

Is it just me, or does everyone else get the feeling that there are two Twitter communities out there? Personally, I follow friends, one or two announcement streams, and an influential figure or two in the Ruby community. Essentially, I use it as a quick tool to keep up to date on what's important to me.

Then it seems like there's everyone else who just discovered Twitter in the past month or two. These people seem to be either one of "I can follow my favorite celebrity! It's like I'm almost touching them..." or "I'm going to be huge and have lots of followers and feel important for it..." For them, Twitter is just the latest fad like Facebook, MySpace, Geocities, etc. before it.

I guess, even though I've been on Twitter for a while now, I still don't get it. Maybe I'm elitist? Maybe I'm becoming out of touch?

ahoyherevor 17 Jahren

Your perception is wrong - there are not two Twitters, but a million Twitters. It's been that way for a couple years almost, altho it is now achieving critical mass.

Since "friend" relationships are only one way, everybody builds the Twitted they want to see. That's part of its appeal and why it's so interesting to an experience designed like me :)

jballancvor 17 Jahren

There's that too. If I were a social researcher rather than a biology/computer science researcher, I think I would be banging down the door of Twitter headquarters for unfettered access to their raw data.

In some respects, Twitter has become the human social genome project.

ahoyherevor 17 Jahren

There's not a whole lot of "private" data that Twitter keeps locked up. Their API and search are very good, with few exceptions.

Have you seen this project of mine? http://twistori.com

Or the PepsiCo Zeitgeist, which I designed & developed with my husband for the SXSW conference. The conf's over now so the experience isn't the same, but videos of it in action are here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/pepsicozeitgeist

jballancvor 17 Jahren

I had actually sen the pepsicozeitgeist bit...very cool! It reminded me a bit of http://www.wefeelfine.org/

amixvor 17 Jahren

This really does not surprise me, as stupid things are known to hit the viral spot. On Facebook for example, most things that go viral are applications where you can throw sheep at your friends or pick your top 5 beers - I haven't yet tried a viral FB application that has been useful, it's kind of sad.

jfarmervor 17 Jahren

People use Facebook to waste time and chat with friends. Is it really surprising that all those social tax preparation or contact management apps haven't caught on?

froovor 17 Jahren

As someone who spearheaded something stupid last year I'd like to share some metrics on just how far stupid can get out of hand.

First, screenshot from Google Analytics of the period

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...

That was from time the domain was registered (I actually reg'd it on oct 3) to the time I stopped caring about it. I sold it sometime later to recoup the server costs (and got a little cash on the side). It was hosted on mediatemple, and version 1 of the site used way too much of their alloted monthly GPU usage. Here's another graph of the first day which I screenshotted at the time.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/gpu.jpg

I ended up using about 2x the monthly GPU usage over the first 18 hour period before I took it down and the site iterated from a PHP version of the voting script to a JS version to try and distribute the processing power a little bit. If I recall correctly there were about 34 major iterations over that month period and countless minor ones just to keep several steps ahead of MTV.

MTV's traffic to their UK site went through the roof at the time

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/mtv.co.uk

This can be confirmed as I actually had someone inside MTV (who reached out to me first) sending me statistics of what was happening internally on their servers. Here is one of the screenshots (of many) I was sent from within MTV about the actual stats from their servers.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/ema.png

You'll notice there is a point where there was no traffic, that was a few hours in which they took down the voting backend to make some changes to handle traffic. They actually took down the systems several times over the month (at one point a whole weekend to add another server - which was misconfigured and we ended up telling MTV about it so they could fix it... heh, misconfigured Apache)

It got to the point where MTV wanted to interview me about what was happening.

http://files.marklancaster.org/images/didwewinyet.jpg

And being interviewed by Wired was the high point of the whole thing for me.

http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/10/rick-astleys-on.html

But basically, the moral of the story is that the "smart people" on the web are vastly outnumbered. I think we often tend to forget that we're in the minority.

If the mantra is "make something people want", then one of the answers is "make something stupid"

EDIT - lots of edits to clarify and add metrics/screenshots.

There were many screenshots taken over that period as I catalogued everything I could when I had originally stated my intentions here on HN.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=323248

dwwatk01vor 17 Jahren

I'm all for good, original ideas, but I have to send a big 'who cares?' to this one...

Andysvor 17 Jahren

Its not exactly original.

Back in the 1990s a bunch of us sysadmin types created an identical website where it graphed everyone's unix machine uptimes in a similar way (with variable length ePenises).

But back then, it wasn't twitter, it was just a small joke shared on IRC amongst friends. I had no idea back then we were 10 years ahead of the curve, and no idea that this sort of thing would reach global proportions and even start to be picked up and shown on TV.

jskopekvor 17 Jahren

The idea is crap, and there's very little future in it, but the lessons learned from it seem valid to a wide number of startups: find an influential champion to spread the word, make it easy to discover and use (a first time can measure their e-penis in a couple of seconds), and make it easy to share.

zitterbewegungvor 17 Jahren

Its more of a viral marketing experiment. I have a strong disdain for viral marketing because instead of being able to ignore it your friends make you use the application.

lunchboxvor 17 Jahren

Nice, but they should give the measurements in inches as well.

[deleted]vor 17 Jahren