The original (or maybe not) llamacycle.

Via The Affected Provincial’s Almanack

I think this ad for the Breast Cancer Wellness Association is kind of brilliant. Or maybe I’ve been up for too long.

Via I believe in advertising

If I remember correctly, Hegel coined the term “Weltgeist,” roughly meaning that the world’s intellectual and philosophical development follows a predetermined trajectory towards some objective measure of “truth.” It might also characterize what happens when things are discovered simultaneously in different parts of the world.

Either, we found another astonishing piece of evidence for this phenomenon, or we got scooped hard! On October 19, Kevin and I started working on and published a prototype of Blamr, a Facebook app that would let you blame others for things. Coffee empty? Kitchen dirty? Shitty weather? Blame your co-worker, roommate, the government (publicly)! If the blamed one doesn’t think it’s their fault, they can pass the buck to someone else.

Yesterday, we discovered that someone at Arizona State beat us with his version of the app, which he called the Blame Game. It’s roughly the same, but it works and has accumulated 600+ users since its launch around October 24.

So what happened here? Did someone notice our development version of Blamr, look at the features and decide to use that spare weekend to do a faster better job? Cheesy though it sounds, I’m inclined to believe in the Weltgeist-inspired explanation. The Facebook developer platform is less than a year old, and already Startups, Workshops and a whole economy around it is emerging. It seems that currently, everyone’s “just throwing a ton of facebook at the wall” (Kevin) to see what sticks. Facebook’s API makes it easy to write useful applications in little time, and maybe the idea of a social blaming tool isn’t so special after all.

The story raises an interesting issue, though: As far as we know, there is no way to develop Facebook applications offline. If you write and test it, it’s there for others to see, at best protected through obscurity. Will Facebook provide a stealth mode for its developers and, perhaps more importantly, come up with a way to facilitate distributed, offline development and testing?