(OT)
We've had an exciting past week at our house. By way of background, Facebook, the college social network site, on May 26 announced they were opening up their platform to outside developers. My two sons realized that an application they had developed for their own social network site would be perfect for Facebook. Over the Memorial day weekend they recoded the application to fit the Facebook API and to make it more scalable, and launched it last Tuesday. The application is called Graffiti, and it allows users to draw on each others' "walls" (a wall is a space on a user's profile where friends can leave messages) using a program rather like a simpler version of Microsoft's paint. Because each user draws on a friend's wall, it spread exponentially. They had 100 users after one day, 1,000 after 2, 10,000 after 3 days, 100,000 after 4 days at which point they had to rate limit the growth so they could put more servers up. It's currently at around 300,000 users (or will be by the time I have finished this post :) )
On the downside, they could really have used Provigil - they've been getting only a few hours sleep each 24 for the past week. But on the upside, they've had several offers to buy the application, and one of my sons and his business partner are being flown out to San Francisco tomorrow to meet with some fairly heavyweight internet players. My younger son, who is the main programmer and techie, is staying behind to keep the servers up and running - not an easy job for a graphics-intensive application growing this rapidly.
I haven't had the "talk" with them yet - the one about how young internet moguls are supposed to support their parents in a lifestyle to which we hope to become accustomed. :)
Here's an example of what one artist-type did with the program:
Of course most actual graffiti in practice are, well, more graffiti-like. :)
Peter |
