

Ask YC: Easter eggs for web apps? - thorax

It seems pretty rare for web apps to have easter eggs. Why is that? It felt a lot more common in desktop development than on webapps.<p>Am I just overlooking them? Or do they change more often once someone finds them?<p>Are you putting easter eggs in any of your web apps/sites?
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ojbyrne
Digg has a couple. If you view source and go to the bottom of the page you'll
see:

<!-- digg is done serving you. 2.01355321270u 137.03599911
6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 --> those constants spell out (of
course) digg. Barely an easter egg, but thought I'd throw it in.

There's a key-sequence that mimics a cheat from some game that will expand the
comments completely. You can search digg for it if you're curious.

I think that because websites do change more often than desktop environments,
people don't look for easter eggs with the same passion. And maybe because the
effort involved in building and distributing a website is so much less than
building and distributing a desktop application, that makes it more ephemeral,
and programmers less likely to put in the time to build elaborate hidden
functionality.

The constants thing was there for over a year before anyone noticed it.

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noodle
for the even more curious, the konami code on digg expands all comments on a
page.

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timothyandrew
What's the konami code?

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noodle
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konami_Code>

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eccp
I did it!

Open Firefox and go to <http://adsl2.ctc.cl/adsl2/>

See the Telefónica logo on the upper left? Click on the dot in the "i" on the
logo to see the credits of the authors of the application.

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huherto
It is nice to recognize the development team. Cual de ellos eres tu?

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eccp
Denis Fuenzalida, the second on the list :-)

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delano
It surprises me too! (Although I think it may have something to do with web
applications still being in the adolescent phase where they're trying to prove
themselves to the world.)

I built two easter eggs into YellowPages.ca and they survived for two years
until I finally mentioned them to a business manager who I can tell you, did
not find them amusing. You can still see the evidence though:

<http://yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/invaders/space>

What: invaders Where: space

They obviously don't see the marketing potential in "fun" searches.

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asdflkj
Perhaps because easter eggs are a symptom of stifled creativity, which isn't
as much of a problem with startups?

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nilobject
I tend to think that Easter Eggs are a sign of creativity in and of
themselves. In one of my unreleased desktop applications, we poured way more
time into an Easter egg than we should have (and uncovered a very interesting
way to DOS a mac). It's a fun creative outlet.

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alaskamiller
He meant that people put easter eggs into applications because they hated the
corporate drone work and used the eggs as a form of rebellion. Web 2.0 was
suppose to free us all from that sort of drudgery.

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noodle
because its a lot harder to hide them with web apps.

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antirez
why? this is what I used: when an user searches for a given keyword in the
search box (a very unlikely search but not impossible from time to time) the
ester egg is activated (setting a cookie).

p.s. is it a problem of mine or hackernews is monkey asses slow?

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marrone
view source on <http://mootools.net/> and you are treated to some artwork

~~~
therubberduckie
Ditto on Vimeo.com and Tumblr.com

