Male enhancement!

Seriously it was the same thing ivankirigin said - what's the worst that can happen?

We actually did the same thing for Kongregate. Except we gave out an invite code to everyone who asked - usually same day. So the artificial scarcity was... artificial. But if we'd had a big problem we could have stopped the invites.

We did that for about two months and then took the invite barrier down. Worked for us.

edit: I forgot the second half of this story. A few months after we took the invite barrier down, we decided to do a "Hollywood" launch - really all we were doing was changing the "alpha" to "beta" and releasing some new features (earning cards by playing games). It worked, we got lots of press. Fox News even called and asked if I could go on their afternoon cable show. I did (here's the video - http://tinyurl.com/2gpz7x). Our site immediately cratered - it was a much, much bigger surge than Digg. We got it back up in about 20 minutes and the follow on traffic was good as well.

So I guess we did a hybrid Gmail/Hollywood.

Is anyone here using New Relic RPM? The demo looks slick. We're currently doing things a little more adhoc for Kongregate. Just using pl_analyze - http://rails-analyzer.rubyforge.org/pl_analyze/

New Relic is pretty sick. Definitely recommended.

Yes. And vans are more commodious (and therefore better) than cars.

Would you argue that the ability to form ad hoc queries for answering questions not originally imagined when writing an application fails to make the relational model superior to something without that property?

(I see you develop with Rails though, so probably yes.)

Actually one of the most interesting things at RailsConf was MagLev, which applies the GemStone object persistence engine to Ruby. Apparently there are some pretty big Smalltalk apps out there using GemStone. http://chadfowler.com/2008/6/5/maglev and http://ruby.gemstone.com/

One of the interesting technologies that Gemstone has had in its portfolio for years is the ability to make its data available in relational/SQL DB form. You can have your app running on top of an OODB, but still interface with your Fortune 500 comrades who want to do SQL queries for Crystal Reports.

I had the opportunity to work with Smalltalk/Gemstone in 1994. At that time we thought OODBMS was the next big thing. Programming was easier. However, soon it was clear to me that OODBMS was not the way to go. For example versioning is quite simple in an RDBMS compared to an OODBMS.

There's this one too - http://hoptoadapp.com/welcome.

Haven't tried either one yet.

I missed this too - I think putting a little play arrow next to the "+" is in order.

Other than that, I love it.

As the company grows, the extra friction on communications between the two locations becomes more of a problem. My company, Kongregate, has 10 people in San Francisco and 5 in Portland, Oregon. We make it work through all the methods you describe, but the couple of weeks a year when we all gather in the same place are definitely easier.

I love you guys. Thanks for finding a business model that helps support independent game developers like whoever wrote that Desktop Tower Defense game.

(shameless plug) - If you are an achievement addict try it on my site - http://www.kongregate.com/games/Scarybug/chronotron

Looks pretty cool, and the physics are a nice touch. Honestly though, I'm pretty skeptical about people being able to create much of a variety of games unless they can do basic scripting. Still, there's a lot of 'remix this game' possibilities.

I think they have a basic event framework. Think about all those side scrollers out there, working with the same physics and layout - with almost unlimited possibilities.

It's like myspace layouts + flash gaming. I think people will love it.

I hate to be the naysayer on this, but I disagree. An ugly MySpace page is interesting because your friends are on it. A bad game your friend made is still just a bad game.

People who are talented enough to make good web games already have a tool to do it with - Flash (typically a pirated version). It's not a perfect tool, but it's very flexible.

I agree that the physics in this thing look great though.

"An ugly MySpace page is interesting because your friends are on it." Exactly! :-) We believe people will want to play their friend's games just like they want to see their friend's MySpace page. The reason they got into MySpace in the first place is because they could express themselves through the layout of their page.

You can't tell from the video, but the social aspects are really big. It's about making, sharing, and playing games with friends.

This isn't for people who know flash. This is drag and drop game creation. They might have solved a really hard problem here.

This could do for games what Dreamweaver and FrontPage did for web authoring - sweet!

"A bad game your friend made is still just a bad game."

I don't think so. I've been doing games for a lot of time and in the amateur game dev communities, users tend to like simple and sometimes bad games that are made by their community friends.

Hi Jim, We certainly have plans to allow people to do a lot more than just basic scripting. The idea is to open the API and let people with the programming skills go as deep as they want.