A Twitter Experiment Dies A Quick (And Deserved) Death
It was called “I Should Know That! The Twitter Trivia Game“. And it was an utter and miserable failure.
The idea: tweet witty trivia questions, followers tweet back answers, a winner is declared, everyone has fun!
Popularity, speaking engagements, a book deal, and my own show on NPR were sure to follow.
The reality: mind-scrambling chaos and indifference.
Answers from a mere 17 followers became impossible to manage. Who was first? That guy? No, wait, her! Too many tweets! Agh!
In short, it was not scalable. Duh.
But now I know.
It could have been a project that was developed over weeks or months, every aspect thought out, every “what if” question asked and exhaustively answered. And it probably would have still failed.
In a fraction of that time I quickly discovered a few things:
- Each daily quiz was a huge time-suck of research and administration.
- Sometimes simple rules aren’t enough.
- It was probably a dumb idea.
But that’s the beauty of putting your half-baked ideas out there, isn’t it? Rapid deployment can lead to rapid enlightenment. In the case of “I Should Know That!” the insight was that I didn’t want to pursue it. End of story. Case closed.
In fact, there’s a certain school of thought that says you should release your incomplete product or service into the wild and let customers dictate what it should be. You’ll learn a heck of a lot about said product and what you’re trying to achieve, possibly saving a lot of time, effort, and money in the process. Whether you agree with them or not is beside the point.
So, my idea of a twitter-based trivia game is yours for the taking. Just remember me if it becomes a runaway success. I’m the guy who screwed it up the first time.
