Day: 12 June 2008

The decline of dinos

No, not a report about the death of dinosaurs many millions of years ago, nor a report about how in fact many dinosaurs didn't die out, but rather evolved into birds... Rather, this blog entry is about dinos which is a Facebook Application written by maxant. Basically, you get a virtual dinosaur which you need to feed. It can also fight or flirt with the dinosaurs of your friends, which directly affects its health. The idea is to keep your dino alive as long as possible. There were several goals in developing it. First of all it was an experiment to see how the Facebook API worked. Second, it was to see how much faster a Facebook application would grow, compared to a normal website, because Facebook gives you  "free website advertising" in terms of being able to invite friends to play your game/application. As such it is a type of viral marketing. The aim is to give it enough momentum that its growth will become exponential. At a minimum, growth should be linear shouldn't it? Well, right from the start, Google Analytics were used to track site traffic. Below are some graphs showing this traffic. The general trend is slow but certain death, much like most original dinosaurs, all those years ago. The point of this blog is not to show that maxant is good at making crap games. Generally speaking Facebook application installations are falling fast, as the novelty wears off. The result is less new people playing…

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