(Lil) Green Patch

~ the eulogy ~

(Lil) Green Patch peaked in the last months of 2008. In turkey those were still the hi5 years, and the platform that produced this thing had not taken over here yet. So the garden is something i read about rather than something i watered.

It was written by Ashish Dixit and David King and it did almost nothing. A patch of ground appeared on your Facebook profile. You put plants in it and clicked to water them, and they died if you stopped coming back. Friends could water yours too, and a plant getting attention from other people grew better than one that was not.

In september 2008 that was rated the number one application on Facebook, above Texas HoldEm Poker. By december 6.3 million people were opening it every month. There was no ending and no score worth having, nothing in it that a person over about twenty five would have called a game.

The part that made it worth remembering is that the clicking paid for something. Watering earned points, and Green Patch converted the points into donations to The Nature Conservancy for rainforest land. By october 2008 that was $91,000. By the end it was $210,261, raised by people idly clicking on cartoon shrubs at work.

~ the dossier ~

~ the mechanic ~

The engine was the notification. Every plant you sent generated a message to somebody else, and the only way to keep a garden alive was to keep other people involved in it. Facebook in 2008 had almost no limits on what an application could push into a feed, so the app spread through the exact channel your friends could not turn off.

This is the reason people who never installed it remember the name. You did not have to play Green Patch to have Green Patch in your notifications every morning for a year. The charity gave the whole loop a defense that a poker app did not have, which is probably why it took the top slot and held it.

~ the funny part ~

Playdom raised a $43 million Series A in november 2009 and bought Green Patch with the money almost immediately. Under six months later it announced it was closing nearly every Green Patch title it had acquired, citing a lack of resources to keep them running. (Lil) Green Patch went unavailable on 10 june 2010.

Seven weeks after that, Disney bought Playdom for a figure reported as high as $763 million. The number one application on Facebook got bought by a company that switched it off for want of resources, and that company was then sold for three quarters of a billion dollars. Nobody involved appears to have thought the garden was the asset.

~ what it left ~

FarmVille took the same loop and put a crop timer on it, so there was a specific hour you had to come back or lose the harvest. Facebook spent the next two years cutting back exactly the notification channels that had made both of them possible, which ended the whole application-viral era on that platform for good.

There is a small detail in the record that outlives the app itself. As of december 2010, six months after it stopped working, (Lil) Green Patch was still the all-time top recruiter for The Nature Conservancy on Causes, with nearly 1,200 users signed up through it and more than double the next name on the list. The garden was dead and the fundraising ranking had not noticed.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »