After I finished up my Facebook Application that displays Foursquare badges, I didn’t really advertise it. Actually I wasn’t sure what the load would be like on my server (and there is a rate limit on the Foursquare API which I wasn’t sure whether I would hit), so all I did in terms of advertising was to create a link and put up a new discussion topic on the Foursquare Facebook App profile. I checked a bit before going to sleep and I still only had two users (Pauline and myself).
When I woke up, I checked the stats again and was very surprised that I had over 160 users! I figured that very few people (but hopefully at least one or two) would read my discussion topic (and then only a %age would actually try the app). 160 was pretty crazy! After a bit of searching, I found out that Facebook Badges was tweeted by a popular 4sq blogger. This was then RT about 15 times during the day.
The whole embarrassing thing about this was that the tweet had linked to my blog (I guess because I put a screenshot up) post that I hastily wrote up. Oops, awkward intersection of personal and public life. It wasn’t even obvious that there was a link between the app and my blog, but I guess if you go through a couple of links you would be able to find it. Plus, my blog entry ended up showing up in the Google search for “Facebook Badges”.
That ended up being the most popular day ever on my blog I guess, although it was nowhere close to a /. effect. Here’s how my analytics puts it:
An interesting thing that I discovered was I actually got a lot of referrals from facebook.com. That was very curious because I didn’t submit my application to the application directory yet. So were people finding about it through their friends’ Likes and status? I later found out that the same 4sq blogger posted it on their page’s wall. 25 Likes and a few comments later, that explains most of my initial users!
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