StrikePad@libs http://matchstrike.net/strikepad Web development and more Sat, 10 Jul 2010 20:58:09 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 The web equivalent of donating an organ http://matchstrike.net/strikepad/2009/12/the-web-equivalent-of-donating-an-organ/ http://matchstrike.net/strikepad/2009/12/the-web-equivalent-of-donating-an-organ/#comments Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:03:50 +0000 Thomas Welfley http://matchstrike.net/strikepad/?p=80 When we first started building @libs, we immediately saw a flaw in our viral adoption strategy. The username ‘libs’ was already registered on Twitter. This meant that when someone mentioned our game in a tweet, the text would be auto-linked to an account that we didn’t have control of. We were so disappointed about not having ‘libs’ that we decided not to invest much time in building a Twitter presence for our app. With the obvious name taken, it just didn’t seem likely that our users would find it without some blatant linkage from the @libs site or spamming the heck out of the #atlibs hash tag. Neither of these options were particularly appealing.

transplantI’m not really sure why, but I decided to message libs to see if she’d be willing to give up her username. Much as I expected, she never responded to any of my @ mentions, some of which offered her money. Those of you that are following me on Twitter probably giggled about the hopelessness of it, but I felt like I had to try.

Days went by and we eventually gave up on ‘libs’ and moved on. Match Strike launched @libs, and then a little while later, we came back to it and added Facebook support. We were really happy with it, but when you’re a perfectionist ignoring the little things only works for so long. Eventually our discussions came back to the missing piece of the puzzle; a presence on Twitter. At first, we spent a lot of time coming up with alternate Twitter usernames for our game. Sadly, they just didn’t seem to fit. ‘Atlibs’, for example, is stunningly redundant. Longer usernames, like ‘playatlibs’, seemed inelegant.  Finding an alternative that we would be happy with seemed hopeless.

Just as we were giving up for a second time, we noticed that libs had been posting all of her tweets from My Opera! I immediately hopped over there, found her blog and sent her one last, desperate plea. To our surprise, she promptly responded with the following:

“In respect of your difficulty, the name isn’t for sale but I’ll let you have it :) and hopefully it will bring you luck.”

We subsequently scheduled a time for her to change her user name (lostnbrainspace — show her some Twitter love!) and we registered libs. In the coming weeks, we’ll explore ways of using it to boost the virulence of @libs in conjunction with our recently deployed Facebook integration.

After working in web development for such a long time, it becomes easy to overlook that outsiders often think of the Internet as a shadowy realm filled with people that want to steal identities or otherwise destroy lives. The insiders know that it’s really just like everywhere else; there are some bad neighborhoods and some bad people about, but there are kind, generous people too. Lostnbrainspace is one such individual. She gave up something that was important to complete strangers a world away and asked for nothing in return.

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