If you were walking recently on a beach in Puerto Rico and saw a strange web address scrawled along the sand, or if you saw balloons released from a window in Chicago with similar hieroglyphics, then they can almost certainly be traced to something written on a napkin and left in an Oxford café by an undergraduate.
Somebody must have picked it up because now, two months later, more than 160 000 people around the world, half of them in the United States, have followed the instructions on a website it pointed to, and its originator, Hugo Shelley, a 21-year-old philosophy and physics undergraduate, has a hit on his hands.
Visitors to the site, Lost.eu, will find an ambitious target — to sign up seven million people so it can claim to be “the largest online game ever”. It is expanding by 2 500 new members every day, but it has some way to go before beating World of Warcraft (which, since Lost.eu was launched, has boosted its subscribing members from seven million to 8,5-million).
You get points for the number of new participants you attract (and half a point for any they subsequently sign up). There is a $5 000 prize for the person with the most points if the target is reached, and other $500 prizes. Not enough to retire on, but handy to cut your student debts.
It is easy to dismiss all this as electronic chain letters. Shelly has a better phrase: “existential advertising”, but then he is a philosopher. He says it is not about content but about spreading an idea. It has already had some interesting consequences. Members have to develop their own guerrilla marketing tactics to get more people on board. Hence the beach in Puerto Rico, the balloons and mysterious URLs appearing in lavatories, on T-shirts and goodness knows where else.
Participants post photos of their invitations (for which there is a special prize) and the site is already developing into a social network with chat rooms, photos, a map of the world showing where you (and other contacts) are, along with other features.
If — and it is a big if — the site attracts millions of members, then it will have a base that could be used to develop a new kind of social networking site. Robin Caller (formerly of FortuneCity, once one of the most popular websites in the world) whose company Goallover has the majority stake in Lost, admits he doesn’t yet know in which direction it will go.
He is thinking of anything from an advertising model to handing the future to participants so they can continue to develop their embryonic entrepreneurial talents.
The lesson of it is how it is becoming easier to turn an idea into reality in your back room thanks to the falling cost of computers and storage, increasingly powerful bandwidth and the ease with which you can build a website.
Alex Tew, the 21-year-old student whose site raised $1-million by selling pixels on his screen for $1 each is a prime example of this. Shelley says the idea first occurred to him in a Starbucks in Leicester Square, London, but instead of sitting on the idea, he did something about it. After starting in Oxford, it was soon taken up by other students there, before spreading on the university network to Cambridge, Princeton, Australia and South America.
This ought to be a golden age for back-pocket entrepreneurs because of the way ideas spread exponentially through networks such as MySpace. It happens with music, but these networks could be the conduit for other initiatives.
The most powerful instrument for turning ideas into reality ought to be the cellphone, since there are two billion of them, but the myopic pursuit of walled gardens and open-ended data charges by the operators has stymied it — at least until very recently when there have been signs of change. But it is also important to have role models to show others what can be done. Maybe that is now starting to happen. — Guardian Unlimited Â