Tuesday 3 July 2007

IB takes over the world

The web's a lot like a school playground where you play with kids in your own "gang" and laugh at the kids who aren't "in", who aren't cool. In online communities there's often a tight-knit bond of some sense of community - even though you've never physically met the people you chat with every day, you get to know each other and allegiances are formed. Often on the web there are comparisons made between other communities, how friendly they are, how good the site is, etc. etc.

The Pirates have a tagline - "Join the Pirates and snipe the world" and love nothing better than pillaging, plundering, and the odd bit of sniping, and I guess it's contagious. So, when the crazy folks at IconBuffet discovered a rival site, which also does icon trading, but which to be honest is a very bad rip-off off IB (we're talking Web 0.1 Beta here - appalling user interface, basic site to say the least, and not altogether high quality icons), the IB regulars just couldn't resist piling in en-masse, and creating a little havoc.

"Since there seems to be a sudden rash of newbies here this morning..." remarked one of their members...hehe! No shit Sherlock! Newbies!? We're not newbies, we're the IB raiding party! There's no tokens and stamps and things there - you just have to make one on one trades for sets with other people. Well of course when a bunch of pixelly-addicted crazies descend on the place all together and all start trading with each other because they all know each other from the Best icon source on the web, all hell breaks loose and there's trading left, right and centre. I'd imagine the regulars there were just sitting there open-mouthed wondering what the hell was happening, and no doubt the folks that run the place were sitting scratching their heads and wondering what had hit their servers with half of IB's membership suddenly descending on them.

Now bearing in mind there's 60-odd icon sets on there....I went from 0 to 36 in a couple of hours (would have been more but I was busy blogging). Other IBers had got practically all of the sets. It was like feeding frenzy at the zoo! Trading madly with email notifications of new requests for trades and confirmation of accepted trades (talk about spam central!) it was like the stock exchange on steroids with the emails coming way after the trade had been made. By then I was onto other trades.

Update: (I've been trading while blogging). Now up to 58 sets! Yay! No idea what I'm gonna do with them, or if they'll be any use at all. Ho hum. Not a very interesting game really, but I suppose it passed a bit of time while waiting for my IB token refill.

3 comments:

FallenAngel said...

Update: In the time it took me to press "post" and flick back to my emails, another 3 trades arrived - only 8 more and I've got the whole set :D

V said...

I have 110 icon packs¡¡¡ recolected in a lot of sites..I`m iconholic...and I want more icons...and more

IB Geek Girls
V.

FallenAngel said...

Update again: I got all of 'em in the end. Would have done it a hell of a lot quicker if I hadn't had to go to work the following day and thus wasted 8 hours. *sigh*

Kinda dull though. I suppose it might kill a bit of time when you're out in the token wilderness, but I can't see it catching on big-time.