18 Dec
3 Little Updates
Sneezies
An update for Sneezies is in the App Store queue, along with apparently every other iPhone App and a million new ones at the moment. Hopefully we’ll see it this side of Christmas, but we can’t be sure.
Cakes
I’m doing everything I can to spread the word about the cake contest, and we’ve been getting some good links. If there’s anything you’re willing to do to help, everyone participating will benefit. There’s a ShareThis button on the contest page, pass it on if you know someone who might be willing to bake something, or even just add a Digg.
A cake (or possibly Bento) from Tim Haines, creator of BurnBall, is already inbound, I’ll be updating the page with that one as soon as I get it.
Update: Tim’s Bento has been added, and it rocks.
Marketing
Another creative idea for an iPhone site today. The iPhone App Index allows developers to log into the site and post their own pages. It may be doomed to be as spam prone as anything that’s ever existed ever in the history of the intertubes, but it’s a noble effort. The idea of small developers collaborating, contributing, and cooperating has always fascinated me.
I’m convinced that small groups/networks of Indie developers have a lot more power than they realize or try to make use of. With their shared Google juice and combined readership… all those resources well directed could undoubtedly create a huge amount of success. There’s a lot of practical problems with that though, one being that any success almost certainly wouldn’t be spread evenly around the group, and we all want to do well. That can make participation tough to sell- after all, time is probably the second most scarce resource for most indies, after money (my new definition of an indie who’s made it is someone who insists that it’s the other way around). You end up with a Catch 22 situation, you have to get enough participation going to breed some success, otherwise most won’t see the value in participation… but then if you get a few big names or a bit of success, everyone wants to be a part of it… but by then the late adopters are just chasing a few crumbs, and they go away feeling like the participation wasn’t worth the effort. Or something like that. Anyway, basically there’s power in the group, but someone has to figure out how to tap into it and direct it, and it’s probably not possible to predict who the light will shine on.
So yeah, iPhone App Index, nice idea, hopefully not doomed to epic spam fail. And, imagine if everyone who posts on there also posted a to link back from their own blog, dugg the site, twittered about it to their friends. Then you start to get some idea of the power the network could have.
By the way, how many more times do we have to read that article about App Store millionaires dressed up and recut in different ways, do we really need another round of gold rush Apps? Surely by now everyone has heard all about the 2 or 3 stock success stories propping up every article.
Posted by Bigger than the sum of its parts? – iPhone App Index on 18.12.08 at 8:25 am
[...] developers!! I was staring at my traffic log as usual and noticed a hit from Antair Games’ blog. Gavin, who posted his Sneezies app earlier this morning, has some interesting observations about [...]