I think what twitter announced is not related to what he is writing about.
- Twitter : They are going to have a nice display of your app in their twitter feed if you put the right meta tag, with rating, pricing, and description (App Card https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/types/app-card)
- Post : You can do deep linking on Twitter with native apps, about specific content of the app (which is the opposite of App Card that looks like a generic promotion of your app).
Deep linking is already possible, and used. But usually apps are sending you first to the browser, because you might be on desktop, and then redirect you to the right part of the app if it's installed.
In any case, I wouldn't call twitter a games platform. And by the way, there have been several twitter games in the past, without much success.
The Twilio api is so simple that this "integration" does not bring much except exposure for Twilio and $20 of Twilio credit for appengine users. We have been using Twilio to send SMS from our appengine app for months now without any issue. In any case a good news.
The app is both on the web and on mobile (iOS and Android app). When you use it on the web, we advertise the mobile version, with the option for the user to give his phone number to receive an SMS on his phone with the install link. It serves as a reminder and ease the experience of finding us on the app store with a way better conversion rate than an email.
Slick - love that use case. Totally one we didn't expect, by the way, but has ended up being super effective.
Super easy to implement and test on GAE too with the Tasks API. The testbed makes an async implementation with full coverage half an hour of work. Big fan of the supplementary services Google provides here.
On a side note, 4M users for a game in 6 months is great but not that extraordinary. Looking at successes like Draw Something and SongPop, from small developers too, it's more in the 50+M but it's in the mobile social space, not sure if I Am Playr is mobile or not.
I had the same reaction! For anyone who's actually attempted to grow anything, that traction is astounding. The draw-something's of the world did something that doesn't even register. It's so outrageous it doesn't even count.
Doing this effectively is absolutely remarkable all on its own.
Around 150k daily active user, it's nice, especially for a first game, but with that you are not even in the top 300 of the facebook platform.
Keep in mind that games are very different from other products. You tend to have lots of them for a short amount of time, then they move to something else. It's not like a service like Dropbox where once acquire you have a very good retention.
The current dance around the broken patent system look something like this :
- When you are small, nobody will come to get you because you are not interesting enough for troll of big compagnies (except maybe other direct competitor but it's unlikely)
- Then you become bigger and you will have to deal with licenses from other compagnies and trolls.
- At that point you become defensive, and start to patent things yourself.
- Then you are unwilling to fight against patents because it starts to be an asset for you. And you might even be tempted to go to the dark side and use them to attack other companies at this point.
The good news in all that is that when you are a small company in software, you should not worry too much about patent. I don't remember any startup failing because of that...
> Think about the "swipe to unlock", when the only thing you have to interact is a touch screen, it's not like there is lots of different possibilities.
And this gets even more ridiculous when all you have to do to work around this is swipe inside a circle instead of on a straight line.
It looks like it's only for old messages. My guess is that what happened is that they migrated some old messages to a new model. Maybe they had a mess of different old models, and some of them where converted to the wrong kind. I guess they were not careful enough with it, I just hope they will be able to revert it...
With any luck they'll start undeleting less-than-charitable picture comments I removed once the subjects of those comments joined Facebook. You know they still have them.
