Determined to keep using my time in the limelight to review obscure products, I took the field with the Swedish browser-based football management game, hattrick.
Much like a lot of web-based applications, hattrick was originally a pet-project for a small group of friends that wanted an easy way to have fun together on the net. If it’s something cool or unique, word of mouth rapidly expands the userbase and, at that point, most of these projects utterly collapse by being unable to handle the increased responsibilities, while a select few of them play their cards right and become Facebook.
Hattrick lies somewhere in the middle. For a lengthy period of time their servers just couldn’t handle the surge in traffic and, with their resources devoted to site management, development for the actual game remained stale. This led to a lot of the users abandoning the game, but enough stuck around for the site to remain viable and still entertain thousands of people, for free.
I had a point about critical paths, but I’ve decided to leave the math/coder-based humour to xcdk.
