When planning out Stikky Tweets, my humble attempt at an April fool prank, I was uncertain of what I should expect. How would I measure it’s success? Would I be happy if only my friends got a laugh out of it? Was the goal to really get people to believe such an app existed? Was the goal to get people upset that such an app could exist? Yes, yes, and yes.

If you aren’t familiar with the idea of Stikky Tweets, and it’s really only an idea, it is a Twitter app that keeps your latest tweet at the top of your followers timeline. Once you tweet again, your new tweet sticks at the top, and sends the one before it back to its place in the timeline. It’s a “good” idea if 1 or 2 people you follow use it. The problem begins when all of the people you follow use it. And that is why it is only a joke.

I got the idea a few weeks ago, and I knew that I would need some help getting it up in time. I called up writer/musician, and all-around funny guy, Scott McCall, to help brainstorm and write some copy. At first, I was calling it Twitter Topper, but the imagery just wasn’t working. At some point, Scott tossed up the idea of an ice cream cone with the Twitter bird sitting on it, and calling it Sticky Tweets. Yes! Now we had something. Once I got home and checked the availability for the dot com I was briefly disappointed to find that the domain had been taken. No problem, using 2 k’s actually made it more ridiculous and more “web 2.0.”

I spent just enough time as needed to get a believable 3-layered ice cream cone logo together, and knew immediately that Helvetica Rounded was a must, as well as pink. This was to be the Baskin Robbins of Twitter apps. The only thing left was getting the copy from Scott, and creating a one-page site with a brief explanation and a BIG sign-up button. Once the sign-up button is clicked the joke is revealed, and users were kindly asked to tweet about it to prank their followers. We gave some focus to the testimonials with some buzzwords linking to some non-existent Twitter profiles, and called it a day. Almost.

I called on the talented and generous designer/coder Eli Van Zoeren to help get our site online. He went above and beyond what I had asked for, and brought some nice details to the site which lended some credibility to our little prank. Now all I had to do was get people to find out about it, and hope that it went viral.

To date, the site has had almost 1,600 hits, and lots of mentions on Twitter. The funny thing is that it’s still going. In fact, my post announcing it got a trackback, by the automated service Zemanta, from this article by Kyle Lacy. That really got me laughing.

Here are some of my favorite Twitter quotes that have come as a result to a terrible (but fake) Twitter app:

I wonder how long till applications like stikkytweets.com make a mess of Twitter? @architexture_ca

@ableparris but if everyone uses www.stickytweets.com, it will cancel itself out, correct?? @chopinlizst

@grainedit That’s awesome. I was pissed when I saw that thinking it was just another annoying thing for companies to bug me with. @jasonrosenb

And my personal favorite:

Avoid http://stikkytweets.com/, they have fake testimonials linked to fake Twitter accounts, now do I dare look any further in? @joshchandler

He quickly followed it up with: Plus, who wants to be the douche who thinks their tweets are worth being held at the top of my Twitter timeline all the time?! #stikkytweets

I loved how he added the hash tag to his tweet. I replied to him (I couldn’t resist) saying, “Wouldn’t it be great?” He was adamant about letting me know how it was not great. I am in no way poking fun at anyone for believing it. More than anything, I’d like to just have a recording of the day. I had a lot of laughs, and I know hundreds of others did too.

Thanks to all of the people who helped spread the word, and thanks to Scott and Eli for devoting a good amount of time to help make it successful. And it was succesfull.