Happy New Year

I've been planning on writing something extremely profound and wise for the last few weeks to signify the start of the New Year, it's almost the end of January and it's becoming a problem so .........



.........Well that should be enough space for you to make something up :)

What I really want to write about today however is the coolest time wasting applications on the internet.

Now well all know that the internet was created by Al Gore to deliver porn to the masses (ref here if you don't know the story about how Al Gore invented the internet http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wiggins/ )

Now some of you close to me might think www.globalcombat.com is the biggest time waster on the internet (I've dropped to 18 :( I musn't be playing enough), well apparently it doesn't even rank.

Here are the top 10 time wasters of the internet
http://freebies.about.com/od/710/tp/timewasting.htm


Without a doubt however my absolute favorite is this one http://www.lunchtimers.com/index.cfm "Someone keeps stealing my letters"

This is a great example of flash programming that is simple to implement, host and is extremely addictive. I'm not sure that there is any revenue involved apart from advertising that would certainly cover costs based on the number of people I see on the site all the time.

Someone said to me at a recent event that the gaming industry is so far behind the movie industry and the reason for that is that no one in the gaming industry is able to produce a "Blair Witch Project" video game (eg The return of investment is an amazing 354,614.29%, as the film had a production budget of $35,000 and grossed $248 million worldwide).

My comment was that there are no other Blair Witch Project films either so it was an unfair comparison BUT...that there are a lot of online games out there that are paying their way and that revenue models are possible just that the cost of building the average MMOG is so out of kilter with the return that they are almost always only earning in the 20-40% range.

So if anyone has a cool application they want to build...go for it, you never know you may be able to give up your day job.

Cheers,
Dean

p.s. if you are a cat lover this may be your favourite
http://www.stuffonmycat.com