I hereby decree

E.ggTimer.com Home Page - Refreshed!

I would like to tell the tale of E.ggTimer.com and how a simple (and silly) side project of mine took on a life of its own thanks to Twitter.

I made e.ggtimer.com back in December of 2008. I made it, as I make many things, because it was something that I wanted and couldn't find anywhere else. I have made many silly things for no other reason than I found myself saying "I should make that" on more than one occasion. Sometimes there are pre-existing solutions to my problems, but there is something about making things that is satisfying and fills a void. I suppose you could call it my hobby.

Anyway, up until a few days ago maybe five people had ever used, or even knew about, E.gg Timer. Then something amazing happened. Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-hour Workweek asked this question via Twitter.


Tim Ferriss asks a question.

"Can anyone suggest a good countdown timer for Mac or both Mac/PC like Compact Timer? http://ping.fm/z0f0S" 2:22 PM Feb 24th

Ben Lew, a friend of mine and web designer extraordinaire, happens to follow Mr. Ferriss on twitter. He saw the question, thought of my simple site, and responded.


Tim Ferriss gets some answers.

"@tferriss correction: http://e.ggtimer.com/ via @lemieuxster" 2:36 PM Feb 24th

Apparently Mr. Ferriss clicked the link and liked what he saw.


E.ggTimer, I choose you!

"Per 19.5K ppl, best Mac timers, descending order: 3-2-1 Timer, Minuteur, and Apimac Timer. My fave: http://e.ggtimer.com/ (via @n0s0ap)" 2:49 PM Feb 24th

After than, and surely due to the popularity of Mr. Ferriss and his position as opinion/thought leader mentions of e.ggtimer started to surge on twitter. People from all over discovered the site and decided they liked it. For whatever reason, a simple Flash countdown timer was really appealing.

The next day, no doubt due to the activity on twitter and the referral from Tim Ferriss, Lifehacker.com put up a story about E.ggTimer and the flood gates opened wide. Lifehacker suffers from the plight of most major blogs, that is copycats and page scraping. Anyway, E.ggTimer got noticed.

I am a bit of an egoist when it comes to things I make online. I like to keep track of who is using and talking about my stuff. I think all Internet developers do this. Maybe I shouldn't admit to it, but I just did. Looking at the comments reveals a fairly normal cross section of Internet users. The overall consensus seemed to be that it was a neat utility. That is more or less what I would expect to hear about a project that took my two hours to complete some random weekend. Unfortunately, some people were taking E.ggTimer was way to seriously. The Internet did not disappoint when it came to people finding ways to put down or defend the existence of the site. There were mentions of how useless the site was, how useful the site was, and one person even went so far as to create their own version and then try to get equal blog coverage.


thetinytimer.com

thetinytimer.com seems very well put together though their page design does seem somewhat familiar...


tinyask.com

I will give the benefit of the doubt on this one. The developer has probably never heard of tinyask.com. But maybe something about "tiny" being in the name makes us want to use that kind of gradient.

The flattery of imitation aside, the response was still more than expected. I received a whole lot of email about my site: People requesting features, telling me "good job", and other advice and communication. Since my contact information isn't really readily available on E.ggTimer itself that means that people were willing to search it out. That is pretty cool.

Perhaps I am reading in to this a bit much. I most likely am. But because of one question on Twitter a site that got 0-2 visitors a day is now getting 4,000+ visitors a day. When Lifehacker posted their story 12,000 people came to the site. I do not expect the traffic to stay up that high for very long. That said, I have been on the front page of Digg a handful of times, even back in the "just tech news" days, and while the traffic from Digg was large, it wasn't nearly as large or as high in quality as the traffic from a well-known blog or from those people coming from Twitter.

(For the record, I have never really actively sought any of this traffic though I can't suppose I would be telling the truth if I didn't think it was the coolest thing ever!)

E.ggTimer is just a simple web-based countdown timer with a fairly hackable URL structure. It isn't part of the next wave in Internet development or anything spectacular. What is spectacular is that Twitter has real-time capacity to drive eyeballs and traffic. People talking, asking questions, and getting answers almost instantly is powerful indeed.