Software Development from Ryan

Not a texas holdem server clone, or a party poker clone even, this man from Belgium wants his very own Gpokr Clone.

I read Buzz Marketing, The Tipping Point and the inferior Pyro Marketing earlier this year. My first experiment with these buzz building ideas in mind, the T.Q. Test, worked well. Unfortunately when people were done with the test the didn’t come back. It lacked stickiness.

Experiment #2, gpokr.com, really improves on a web apps stickiness. Its nothing new. You can play holdem poker for free everywhere on the net. There are actually several very small details that make it different and much more sticky, (although you can’t play for money so obviously its not right for gamblers).

My favorite detail that improves the user experience of the site the most for the amount of code involved is a simple little ranking next to the chip count at the table. After every hand this ranking is updated. I love seeing my progress on a hand to hand basis and have an interest to come back and check it out again. It has a pull to it. I could dream up dramatic development intensive features thinking bigger is better, and I think I usually do, but these little features are so much more valueable. One they are easy to implement and two they do not bloat the app giving it the ability to remain simple.

Techcrunch posted about gpokr today, the the server was shutdown by the host, they received angry phone calls, and the server is running.

The week is off to a good start with a couple big blog posts driving traffic to gpokr keeping the table full with a waiting list most of the day.

jayisgames is a online games blog by Jay Bibby where he keeps very up to date on the latest online games and has generated a quite a large following. He also visted gpokr for a while and chated with his readers and worked his way to a top position on the gpokr top players list. (he’s been bumped down to 11th while writing this),

Also, the Google Web Toolkit Blog made a post today about some of the development that the GWT has been used with and made a mention of gpokr along with some other great work including Mark Roth ’s GWT Hang Man and  Robert Hanson’s GWT Widget Library.

There's lots of great development tools coming out and a lot of interest in building services for people. There is also the "build it and they will come" mentality everywhere.

More often than not it doesn't seem to work. Fold.com has recently closed its doors because it couldn't keep up with competion. Micheal Arrington's comment on fold.com's closing has a good point about building applications:

"Well, the inevitable is starting to happen - a few new web startups are starting to close up shop as they find that building an application is a lot easier than getting users to try it out, and keep coming back" - Micheal Arrington

Innovation in development tools and techniques has a value ceiling. I had a discussion on Joshua Wehners blog this week about the excitement behind Ruby on Rails and why people should not be so excited. Micheal Arringtons point clarifies this again. Technology can get very good, allowing you to make better apps, but everyone is going to be making better apps. There are a lot of areas beyond the tool that you use that you could use to differentiate yourself from the competition to attract people and retain members.

 I've been playing around with different techniques over the  last month. On whirlpad.com, a free travel blogging service I built earlier this year, I introduced a Travel IQ test called the TQ test. It measures your travel knowledge by having you match photos of toilets from around the world to their location. With a bit of seeding this test consistently brings 1000 uniques per day. This is quite a bit more than the homepage of whirlpad.com.

The interesting thing here is that the bottleneck to creating more tests, and getting more traffic is not the technology, RoR or LAMP. They really don't matter. The important work is in the creative effort to develop the test. The travel blogging service, however, has a lot more development work than marking/PR/people-attracting work. 

Being a good developer and usuing the greatest newest technology is not enough anymore. Besides, that type of work can be easily outsourced. Just because its easy for me to grow tomatoes in my backyard doesn't mean I should start a business around it.