1. It’s fun to expose yourself , and others! - I can’t believe how much I have learned about my coworkers and friends from the questions! Really! There is so much discussion in areas I wouldn’t normally feel very comfortable going into unless I had the shield of Mt. Computer.
2. There’s a good amount of us in that little app - I think there are some sumptuous hints at who the creators really are.
3. Everyone pitches in. There are so many people volunteering content every day, and it’s really, really good! We’re making a fun community of question askers, and that is special and valuable.
4. I love that no one wants to be normal. The worst thing to me when I was a kid was how often people would tell me I wasn’t normal. I hated being weird. Now everyone wants to be weird with me.
5. It is a popular app, which is fun and makes me feel special.
6. I love the team magic!
Last week , Are You Normal? crossed over the 500K mark and yesterday hit Number One on Facebook’s Application Directory Recently Popular list.
So what we’ve done is reach out to our many users and ask for their input, ideas, contribution and advice on the content of our application. We’ve had great response world wide and are continuing to receive survey ideas, topics and completed surveys.
It’s been pretty neat to speak with some of the fans of the application, via Facebook messaging for the most part. At the same time, it’s been useful to hear from those people who are not so hot on AYN, but who’ve given some solid constructive criticism and suggestions for ways to improve.
Our latest survey, Are You A Normal Conspiracy Theorist? was written by a local Vancouver artist, and the photography we’ve gathered from all over via Flickr, graciously from Gabriel M., Steve Jurvetson, x-eyedblonde, Yaniv Ben-Arie, CT Snow and Jon Rawlinson. Thank you to all - the app is what it is because of you!
If you’d like to contribute content, visit our topic suggestion page.
Today Joyent announced their new Facebook developers program, Joyent Accelerators. Kinzin is well acquainted with Joyent’s infrastructure - it’s what has made the scalability of the “Are You Normal?” Facebook application manageable and successful. The app has jumped to half a million users in a month, has been one of the top apps on the “Recently Popular” Facebook list (more than once), and continues to add tens of thousands new users every day. Joyent’s full case study and more details on the app can be found here.
Joyent Accelerators is “free, fast and scalable hosting”, as quoted by Facebook Senior Platform Manager, Dave Morin.
Joyent has partnered with Facebook and Dell to deliver this sophisticated, scalable, on-demand infrastructure. For developers, it means a quick and efficient launch of Facebook applications that are capable of scaling to millions of users - FOR FREE.
You can read plenty more about this announcement and partnership on a number of our technologist friends’ tech news sites: Read/Write Web, Innovation Creators, Rootly, Social media today, Information Week.
Thank-you to Kristie Wells, Mark Mayo and the Joyent Team.
