Everyone knows the application DrawSomething and the kind of quick success this application has seen is beyond imagination. This is the application where users can draw doodles and share with friends live. It is something very different and subtle the way you communicate with your friends live. There is human factor involved in this application. This is what i think is the key point of success. There are applications that allow you to create drawing on devices and also to share with your friends over various social networks. This just clears your table and puts a simple idea of sharing a drawing space live with friends. No hassle, no upload to server and sharing of links. Anyway you get my point!
Few events took place in last week, reminded me of my early work in around 2008 when I joined a technology company that used to focus on developing applications on handheld devices. There was no iPhone at that time. People were using ugly/sluggish windows mobile phones. The main key product for this company was a cross platform chatting application on mobile. If I am not wrong, this was the first company to introduce chatting on handheld devices. I was the very lucky one who got to work on this product. In around June 2008, I had completed almost one year working on this product and that is when an idea struck me. This product had ability to work as a platform that could allow developers to create applications (plug-ins) that can communicate over chatting network and allow users to play, share and create photos while chatting. This was a simple idea that allows developers to just ignore about how data will be communicated across devices and focus on making beautiful apps that would make use of this in-place network to share tasks.
My idea was that chatting could be considered as a simple plug-in that actually allows user to send and receive text messages. So we have a network that already does that, then why just limit ourselves on using simple text based communication? People were working on audio and video transfer using same network. Communicating does not only mean that you talk to other person, playing multiplayer game, drawing on a shared workspace etc. also are ways of communication.
I had created a proof of concept to support this fundamental idea. For almost for a month I was working on this idea, (Thanks to my TL and others who supported me while working on this RnD project). I decided to make a plug-in that would allow people chatting on any damn network to share a whiteboard for drawing live (as far as they were using same chatting application with same version plugin). I did not know if that was going to even work. After a month or so, lot of efforts on deciding a protocol of communication over IM networks, creating backend supporting engine to run plugins over the application, a time came when I was actually trying to make it run on two devices (windows mobile 5.0s), I drew a line on one device. I was looking at the other device to see something happening, I wasn’t even expecting to see line, just something on the screen to assume that something was working. I was looking at the screen, it seemed like a longest time span I had waited for something, everything moment I had spent during last one month ran through my mind like a movie. It wasn’t much time; just before 1 sec I saw something appearing on the other screen, I couldn’t believe it was the exact same line, with exact colours I chose on the other device. It was the sense of achievement I cant forget, it was the single best innovative project I worked on as a developer. Very soon it was completed I was able to draw whatever I wanted and share space, exactly the way DrawSomething app does!! (Now you get my point why I was talking about this app at the beginning of this!!)
Soon I created different plug-ins like, battleship, tic-tac-toe etc. I was happy, People were excited to see this kind of application running in reality. It was going to help third party developers create games for this chatting application. That was the main goal from business point of view. To get more visibility around the world and to allow users to play multiplayer games on handheld devices created by these third party developers. It was all going great and suddenly, the concept was killed by senior management (same management who were excited about this one).
Few days back while talking to my colleague who showed me DrawSomething application she was using, I was like “WOW” this is awesome, Finally the concept my company was hesitant to deliver was created by someone after 4 years! I am happy* its out there in the wild and people are loving it 🙂
* I have no relation with the creators of DrawSomething app. This is all there work what appears in the application. I have no intention of calling it my work. Also I don’t mean to be rude to company, whom I joined as a fresher, It was most creative period of my life. This all just needed to come out.
