Wisdom of The Masses

7 Feb 2007

Over late night IRC and IM conversations, the concept was fleshed out with lines like “OpenID is a pipe dream”, “more useful than Twitter”, and various other digs at the latest bubble on the block. While I was eating lunch yesterday, a very excited Jim messaged me via MSN to say that Useless Account had been mentioned on TechCrunch. I was in immediate hysterics. Wow, people were obviously finding this far more amusing than I had expected.

The account tally quickly grew from the low teens to 50-odd, and then the server started to choke. Dreamhost were having some hiccups (their email went down at the same time), so I offered to host the 700+kb of images to lessen the load and hopefully stabilize the site. What’s the point of a parody site that times out when you try to create an account? Little did I know that those images would use approximately 5.5GB of bandwidth over the next 24 hours.

As the day progressed, traffic continued to increase and the account tally kept rising. Once it passed 500, the joke was officially a raging success. Jim was absolutely wrapped and I was blown away that his “silly little joke” had been so warmly received.

Then Digg got onboard.

By this morning, there were over 3000 accounts created and Useless Account had made the front page of Digg and del.icio.us. Things were out of control. Truly, the crowds had spoken. Stupid is good.

The peak is now over, but it looks like the account tally will make it to 5000. That makes my original estimate of 200 off by a long, long way. Congratulations to Jim, and his 15 minutes of fame!

So, who wants to buy a database of 5000 email addresses? JUST KIDDING! Jeez, talk about paranoid.

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Comments

  1. Joey Brooks:

    5.5 GB? Make him pay, I say! :P

  2. Scott G:

    haha. that is such a cool idea.

  3. brothercake:

    That’s pure class :D

  4. Tuna:

    hmm 5000 addresses.. I’ll write you a cheque…

    But wait its being talked about on podcasts too.

  5. Cam:

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who found this unbelievably funny.

    And just to build up my web cred, early-adopter status points and generally show how close my finger is to the pulse, I was the 3rd person to post this to del.icio.us.

  6. Andrew K.:

    You’re The Man, Cam :P
    Apparently Useless Account copped 48,000 unique IPs yesterday. That could have earned close to $2 if Jim had included AdSense!

  7. Hamish M:

    Yay, I have a Useless Account™ :)

    Great job!