I had meant to post this a while back and just didn't get around to it. Since Joe asked, I though I'd fill y'all in.

A long time ago, maybe 8 years or so ago, my brother was hanging out in IRC and they had a bot going that asked trivia questions, and when the answer was given by a member of the channel, it went on to the next question. I saw this and played a little with it myself, and thought it was super fun.

A few years later, I had thought about that brief exposure to that trivia bot, and thought I should make an online or board game like that just for movie quotes. While planning this project, I watched a lot of heavily quotable movies (Ghostbusters, Caddy Shack, American Psycho) and recorded all the good quotes. I probably had 100 or so quotes before I started to lose steam. I might still have that database somewhere. I definitely don't have the code for it anymore (what little code I had).

Fast forward to present time, and pretty frequently, the gamer-nerds and I play isketch (just an online pictionary type thing) occasionally when we're worn out from slaying zombies and dragons.

This got me thinking about that trivia project again, and how it would be a lot of fun as a chatroom-type thinger, but with user-submittable questions, various categories (Movie Quotes, Video Game Trivia, Sports Trivia, Car Trivia, shit like that), a persistent scoring system, and even community moderation type systems: users flagging incorrect entries, advanced users approving new questions, dynamically updating question scores (based on the difficulty of questions, determined by the rate at which users guess it correctly).

So then I came across this Erlang language and decided that this was a small and simple enough project to handle this, and the fact that this type of project naturally lends itself to Erlang's strengths, I decided to go for it.

So I'm working on it and hope to have a prototype working reasonably soon.

Thoughts?

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Do it for the Lobster

Sounds solid. Reminds me of the Buzztime trivia you see in bars like Buffalo Wild Wings. You know, they games you play on those little blue devices. I know they also make trivia games for phones (my old vzw phone has a free trial) and they already have a facebook app. That said, I doubt their scores are dynamic or anything like that, but their trivia runs across a boat-load of topics.

Not to say that you couldn't do something better, just that that's your competition. If they are still doing the 15 questions a day, then you are poised to rock them by offering endless questions and daily/lifetime top scores.

Anyway, sounds cool though. Would be interested in seeing the finished product.

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no fat chicks

Everyone (I think) loves trivia games. Skeez is right, you have plenty of competition. The thing that sets apart the good from the bad is the quality and amount of the questions. By far the hardest part will be compiling thousands of questions to start, and continually adding new ones. User-submitted questions kinda solves that, but only as much as the submissions are quality and there's a decent incentive to submit quality questions. Then scoring the difficulty, etc, thats a lot of work.

I got this game for Christmas last year:
http://www.3historygeeks.com/

The gameplay is obviously nothing new. But it took years to research and compile all the questions.

Yeah, I'm definitely not breaking new ground or anything - trivia is everywhere.

But at the least I think I can generate enough questions on a limited set of categories to get started.

And hopefully, this can generate some additional revenue.

I wonder though, how reasonably I cold leverage mechanical turk for question generation. At $0.10 per question, $1k = 10k questions. That'd be a good start.

And with an open API, building an app for the pre, iphone, facebook, etc would be totally doable to maybe make it the 'go-to' source for trivia questions. Be to trivia what wikipedia was to encyclopedias. One can dream, anyway

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Do it for the Lobster

How were you planning to generate revenue? Ads?

I read some article somewhere about this guy that makes flash games. He found out quickly that people don't really pay for online games. Somehow it occurred to him to make the games into ads for companies. So he makes flash games that are fun (not like punch the monkey banners, etc) but themed for upcoming movies, new products, etc.

Maybe thinking along those lines you could come up with B2B revenue.

I don't know if this is the company I read about http://www.threemelons.com

But they're doing the same thing.

Quote by stevo

How were you planning to generate revenue? Ads?

Yup. If it grows enough, then I could work on trying to get some B2B deals. I hadn't given B2B much thought for this particular project.

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Do it for the Lobster

After a reasonbly long hiatus from working on the trivia thing (I spent all summer -up until november even- playing volleyball and not really working), I'm back to the grind on it now.

It should be ready for alpha testing soon (just to get my friends trying it out to see how it works for them).


I ended up abandoning the mnesia database, due to the overall pain it is to change table definitions, and migrated the storage to mysql. But everything else is running in erlang, using the nitrogen web framework for erlang.

Right now, the total code-size is a little over 2000 lines, so pretty small.

I should have a playable version up this week, if all goes well. I'll run to chicago and deploy it on a server I decommissioned from my WoW stuff.

So I'm pretty excited.

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Do it for the Lobster

Quote by Chops

I should have a playable version up this week, if all goes well. I'll run to chicago and deploy it on a server I decommissioned from my WoW stuff. So I'm pretty excited.

Cool, keep us posted. I'm interested to see how it turned out!

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no fat chicks

The latest development:

So I had not yet decided upon a name, I wanted to make it relatively easy.

About a month ago, I noticed that triviathing.com was available, but I didn't buy it (because I usually end up buying domains for any idea I get, and then they sit, and I didn't know if I wanted a name that...uncool, I guess). In any case, I didn't buy it, and two weeks ago someone else did, before I decided to try buying it sunday.

I emailed the admin contact from the whois registry, and he's agreed to sell it to me for $100. Worth it, to me, but gay that I didn't just go with my instinct to buy it.

Oh well, just goes to show you.

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Do it for the Lobster

Domain name acquired. Should be going live this week.

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Do it for the Lobster

Quote by Chops

The latest development: So I had not yet decided upon a name, I wanted to make it relatively easy. About a month ago, I noticed that triviathing.com was available, but I didn't buy it (because I usually end up buying domains for any idea I get, and then they sit, and I didn't know if I wanted a name that...uncool, I guess). In any case, I didn't buy it, and two weeks ago someone else did, before I decided to try buying it sunday. I emailed the admin contact from the whois registry, and he's agreed to sell it to me for $100. Worth it, to me, but gay that I didn't just go with my instinct to buy it. Oh well, just goes to show you.

Man, I've bought, and even renewed, so many domain names just because they seemed cool and useful at the time. You waste more money than a new domain costs on all kinds of crap, might as well just pick up whatever domain you can think of if you think it'll be useful to you.

Looking forward to the alpha launch!

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no fat chicks

Quote by Chops

The latest development: So I had not yet decided upon a name, I wanted to make it relatively easy. About a month ago, I noticed that triviathing.com was available, but I didn't buy it (because I usually end up buying domains for any idea I get, and then they sit, and I didn't know if I wanted a name that...uncool, I guess). In any case, I didn't buy it, and two weeks ago someone else did, before I decided to try buying it sunday. I emailed the admin contact from the whois registry, and he's agreed to sell it to me for $100. Worth it, to me, but gay that I didn't just go with my instinct to buy it. Oh well, just goes to show you.

Man, I've bought, and even renewed, so many domain names just because they seemed cool and useful at the time. You waste more money than a new domain costs on all kinds of crap, might as well just pick up whatever domain you can think of if you think it'll be useful to you.

Looking forward to the alpha launch!

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no fat chicks