Facebook game: Snowball Fight

What started out as a very small experiment in Facebook virality eventually exploded with users!

I originally created Snowball Fight to play with the Facebook APIs, as part of the Facebook course, which I was a TA for.

After the course ended, I tinkered with it further, adding some additional features.

The most interesting feature I added was a second method for acting in the game, once the user had hit Facebook’s rate limit.

This was done by creating a second interface that would appear after the user had reached their limit. This interface would allow them to continue throwing snowballs, albeit only at people who had already installed the application.

I left the game running with no further pushes to encourage growth. In late September 2008, it suddenly began to grow. Through some rather shocking organic growth, it managed to generate a tremendous number of users!

A few quick statistics to explain the scale of the application. At last count:

  • there are 95,874 users who have ever been active (defined as they have thrown at least one snowball)
  • 1,026,801 snowballs have been thrown
  • Traffic peaked at 42,092 throws in one day!