Wind Rises 2005

Chapter 498 Farming and stealing vegetables

Just when Ma Liang and Bing Meiren were feeling happy, the Twitter company on the other side of the ocean ushered in the largest website upgrade since its establishment.

This time not only the page has been optimized and adjusted, but also a series of new features have been launched.

The most eye-catching one is the launch of the personal homepage section.

Although a lot of the content in this new section is borrowed from the two social giants Facebook and Myspace, there are still many completely new designs.

And many of the creative ideas in it were provided by Ma Liang to Twitter.

Of course, he himself is not that capable, so he all referenced it from the QQ space and Facebook homepage in his previous life.

Twitter issued an update announcement two weeks ago, and the news spread early.

U.S. time, January 2008, 1 at 1:0.

On the first day of the new year, the newly revised Twitter website was finally launched as scheduled.

Countless people around the world are waiting in front of their computers, waiting for this momentous moment to come, hoping to see one surprise after another.

Just after midnight, netizens kept refreshing the homepage of the Twitter website, wanting to experience the updated functions as soon as possible.

But the more everyone does this, the greater the pressure on the website server.

The page was stuck for a while, and then many people found that the Twitter homepage could not be refreshed.There is only a blank page in front of me, and the page keeps showing loading and spinning in circles.

It wasn't until a minute or two later that the situation was relieved.

Then a brand new Twitter homepage appeared in front of netizens, and the new website instantly made many people's eyes shine.

Brand new page layout, more friendly UI design, every detail is full of sincerity.

But netizens no longer had the time to slowly appreciate the aesthetics of Twitter. Everyone clicked on their account avatars and hurriedly opened their personal homepages.

Twitter dynamic publishing, personal album upload, fan message board, music sharing
Brand-new functions have caught the attention of countless people. The most important thing is that users of all these sections can set access permissions.

Whether you choose to open it for everyone to view, or set it so that only specific groups of people can view it, everyone can easily set it.

This is equivalent to combining pan-social and acquaintance social, allowing users to switch freely.

Open pan-social is the ultimate form of a social platform. After all, only in this way can the platform continuously generate more new content.

Facebook, which was the king in the previous life, has always followed this route. It was not until later that it acquired WhatsApp that it slowly began to create more private social network products.

It takes a process to transform a "public square" into a "private living room". This is just a service provided by the platform to meet the different needs of users.

No one can answer this question whether it is satisfied by the same product or by different products. Which route is more correct?

But in Ma Liang's practical experience with Internet companies in his previous life, most of the successful cases were the latter.

Only Goose Factory initially tried to use QQ as a product to meet the two different user needs of pan-social networking and acquaintance social networking.

It's just that it was too late for Goose Factory to start doing this. Sina Weibo had already become popular at that time.

This caused the [QQ Weibo] product to not develop later, and in the end it had to be left alone, without successfully realizing the ambition of a single product to kill everyone.

But now Twitter is completely different. With Ma Liang's intervention, it took the lead in taking this path.

At this time, Facebook is not yet a dominant player. On the contrary, Twitter, a pan-social platform that has come from behind, has an even more obvious information advantage.

Especially after this revision, the product is close to the mature version of Twitter and Weibo in the previous life.

At this time, the function of personal homepage will be launched, and the short version of socializing with acquaintances will be added. What it will eventually develop into, Ma Liang himself does not know.

But what he can be sure of is that at least the game "Happy Countryside" will definitely kill everyone.

As long as this game can be popularized and the personal homepage function is added, it will be enough to grab a large number of users from Facebook.

In addition, Twitter has already stepped out of North America first, and it will definitely gain a foothold overseas with a first-mover advantage.

Before, all these were Ma Liang's predictions and speculations, but from now on, they will start to be verified one by one. Whether it succeeds or fails depends on the feedback from netizens today.

At this time, countless netizens opened Twitter's new page and logged in to their personal homepage.

In addition to experiencing the new features, most people focused on a very eye-catching button on their personal homepage - [Farmville].

This is the name of the English version of "Happy Farm". Clicking in will bring up another game page.

Because of the previous trailer, countless netizens are looking forward to this new casual game and can’t wait to start experiencing it.

After simple guidance, the players quickly became immersed in it.

Buy seeds, plow the fields, grow vegetables, apply fertilizer, and drive away insects, as if you are really running a farm, waiting for the harvest of crops to arrive.

The Twitter version of "Happy Farm" that netizens are playing at this time is different from both "QQ Farm" and "Farmville" in the previous life. It is a product that Ma Liang combined and improved by combining the advantages of the two.

Not only is it more playable, it's also more addictive.

In particular, the social effect of the small game of stealing food is brought to the extreme.This makes netizens start to play the game for a while, and they can't help but ask their friends around them to benefit from the game, hoping to steal vegetables from their friends' "farms" as soon as possible to obtain more resources and develop faster.

"Happy Farm" is just like its previous life, constantly being circulated in major forums and instant messaging tools.

The spread of the game is several times more exaggerated than the "Flappy Bird" game launched on Christmas Day.

At one time, millions of traffic poured into the Twitter website, almost causing the server to crash again.

If Twitter had not been prepared, this wave alone would have been scolded by countless netizens.

If it was just like this, how could it show the genius of Ma Liang's life-changing plan? You have to know how many brain cells he had died for today.

Then came the more exciting operations, and players discovered that there were some special plants and crops in "Happy Farm".

Looking at these illustrations of plants and crops, I had never heard of them before.

Pea shooters, cherry bombs, nut walls, potato mines, torch stumps, street lights, cabbage pitchers, watermelon pitchers, machine gun shooters, corn cannons, etc...

What the hell?Netizens were puzzled.

Although the names are weirder than the last, looking at the shapes of these plants in the illustrated book, I found that they are quite cute.

This is also part of Ma Liang's plan. He wants to combine the two games "Farm" and "Plants vs. Zombies" to bring strong social attributes to each other.

Only in this way will the playability last longer.

When Zynga launches "Plants vs. Zombies" by the end of this year or early next year, more people will definitely go crazy for it.

The copyright of the game is still firmly in Ma Liang's hands as always.

It’s just that it’s licensed to Zynga for development, and the revenue is shared proportionally.

The original development company of "Plants vs. Zombies" [Baokai Games] probably just has an idea at this time, and there is no way to talk about specific product planning.

So you don’t have to worry about collisions or plagiarism. At most, it’s just creative similarities.

Moreover, Ma Liang gave a mature game plan, and even asked Yu Mo to draw all the illustrations of various plants, which made him panic.

What is displayed in front of the players at this time are the special plants and crops in "Plants vs. Zombies".

If you want to obtain these special plants and crops, you must save a certain amount of resources to exchange for puzzle pieces. Only when all the pieces are collected can a complete plant be assembled.

Otherwise, you can only grow some ordinary things on the farm for fun, and watch the friends who have gathered do it.

That's how people are, the more they whet their appetites, the higher they get.

The rarer something is, the easier it is for more people to pursue it.

This principle is the same in games, such as special equipment, cool skins, cool cars, etc.

We all have the same human nature. Who doesn’t want to plant special plants as soon as possible so that they can show off?

But if you want to get special plant crops earlier, in addition to recharging krypton gold, you can only amway more friends to participate together.

Only by stealing more resources from your friends' "farms" can you gather the conditions faster.

In this way, the social nature of the game "Happy Farm" will be stronger, and the collection setting will be more addictive.

Many netizens have only been playing for half an hour, and they started to force their closest friends to play together.

As a result, on the first day of the New Year, tens of thousands of netizens around the world are doing the same thing: farming.

For Twitter, this means that registered users and active users continue to rise.

Throughout the day, the total number of registered users increased at a rate visible to the naked eye.

1500, 1550, 1600 million...

Until 24 hours after the game was launched, the number of registered Twitter users was fixed at 1862 million.

In one day, it increased by more than 300 million.

This number was nothing in the era of the most developed mobile Internet, but it was nothing short of a miracle in the PC era.

Not only the number of registered users continues to grow, but the number of people online is also constantly breaking records.

Because even if many people can't play for the time being, they still don't forget to hang up there all the time. After all, the plants in the "farm" are waiting to be harvested at any time, and they have to go to friends to "steal vegetables" from time to time.

This is only the first day, and the game "Farm" is still spreading wildly.

The most amazing thing is that "setting the alarm clock to collect the food" does not require anyone to teach you, and it is magically happening all over the world.

Countless people have the same idea in their minds: farming and stealing vegetables.

(End of this chapter)