A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality. I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and m

A few years ago I'd a much more humble experience with virality. I'd decided to hack off a quirky part of a project I was working on into a jQuery plugin and make a landing page for people to play with it. Nobody went to it. For months. Like not one person. It's still online today, although I've obviously broken the plugin at some point [1]. Months later my jaw hit the floor when I woke up to an inbox full of emails about this thing. The page had had thousands upon thousands of hits. Not from Belfast, but from NY and SF. It had been featured on a ton of blogs, discussions etc, all in the 6 hours or so I'd been asleep. Traffic had peaked, but it kept coming. A friend we hadn't seen in a while called into our little co-working space to tell me "that thing you put on Hacker News" had been on the front page for hours. I'd never even heard of HN at this point! There was no rhyme nor reason to any of this. The page had been available for months. All I can surmise is that something lit the touchpaper that started a chain reaction. And that I've a lot to learn about how virality works and what makes it function. It makes me wonder did he really engage in some grey market stuff to push Flappy Bird a little. I kind of wonder why he would fork out for something like that when the precedent would indicate he wasn't onto a winner with this game. In retrospect we know he had a great game, the potential for serious chain-reaction style virality was there, maybe the spark that lit the touch-paper was something innocuous that no-one would ever guess? [1]: http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/ http://opensource.rotify.com/wormhole/