Jumping On the Bandwagon

Nokia and Microsoft's deal has been getting a lot of press in the last week. Nokia Plan B (which has now been revealed as a hoax) got a lot of attention on Hacker News and spawned a bunch of knock offs which I was taking a look through on my morning train ride. By the time I'd got to work I'd decided to contribute my own poor sense of humour to the mix and set off on the quickest web page launch I'd ever done. The result was Nokia Plan XP which was put together in the time it usually takes me to get my morning coffee.

I tweeted the link to @ricardovice who was nice enough to add my page to his canonical list of wasted domains. There wasn't really a point to the page but I was kind of interested to see how much traffic I could get from riding the coat tails of funnier people than myself. The traffic I did receive wasn't extraordinary but in twelve hours I got 3,800 hits. 95% of that was purely from Ricardo's list. The remaining was from Hacker News (I shared the link in a comment thread) and my meager 100 Twitter followers. Only 24 people followed the link through to my website.

I'm not going to pretend that there are any great lessons to be learned from this. It was fun to be able to launch a concept including purchasing the domain and some dodgy Photoshop hackery in twenty minutes. Getting traffic is always nice too. As a side note I actually own a Windows Phone 7 device and think the Nokia chose was a decent one, especially considering how much Microsoft is throwing money at them.