Challenge Me

My future employer is having a huge day today, as far as publicity is concerned.

Last night Duels.com was featured in an article by TechCrunch, a very popular blog that covers what’s new with startups and the internet. Within hours the site was hit by people and the guys were up all night trying to manage the extra load.

By 2am the site reached the top popular bookmarks of del.icio.us. The guys start stripping extraneous database queries and try to optimize every little tiny thing they can to get the site to withstand the beating of traffic.

At 8am a press release hit the wires announcing the availability of the new game. Its hard to measure what kind of impact that will have. When I checked in with the guys before lunch there were 1200+ new account registrations.

At noon the site was featured on the front page of digg.com. Shortly after lunch a user from digg created an entry in Wikipedia for Duels. Needless to say, the servers are possibly going to be unresponsive for the rest of the day.

The great thing is that in the middle of all the frustrated people trying to reach the site, I see a lot of curiosity from their comments. This curiosity should pay off over time when the servers are back to normal because these sites featuring the game are social bookmarking sites. People really do want to know what this thing is about and they’re planning to come back later to see it.