Chris Armstrong

Well that was a bizarre day.

For my latest uni project, we had to come up with a fake conference to be held in Belfast, brand it, and design promotional material for it. Inspired by Build, I created Tick Talk: A Web Conference About Time. So my tutors could access it easily to mark it, I hosted it in a random folder on my website.

Then, just around lunchtime today, somebody somehow came across it (presumably through Google, though what they would have been searching for I have no idea). Thinking it was real (and impressed by the unlikely line-up of speakers), they tweeted about it. Then somebody else tweeted about it. Then Andy Good (organiser of Build) tweeted about it, and the stuff hit the fan.

By the time somebody told me to check Twitter an hour or so later, a few hundred people had visited the site, 88 of whom had ‘signed up’ (there may have been more if the form hadn’t kept crashing, thanks to some glitch with Typekit), and big-name designers who I follow were talking about my site… including Andy Budd, who was rightly miffed that some poxy web conference was advertising him as a speaker without even asking him. Thankfully when I explained the situation he took it in good humour, as did most of the people who were accidentally fooled, although there were one or two individuals who were less than amused (one guy had suffered Safari crashing on him three or four times when he tried to sign up, yet he persevered… only to discover that it was just a student project).

“Yes, Tick Talk is rather nice.” -Elliott Jay Stocks

Despite the irony that a conference which was supposed to be about saving time on the web ended up wasting a LOT of people’s time, the outcome seems to be mostly good. Even when they found out it was fake, people were still talking about the design of it on Twitter (even Elliott Jay Stocks conceded tweeted that “Yes, http://chris-armstrong.com/ticktalk/ is rather nice.”).

The bizarre experience has highlighted a few things to me:

• Web standards work. I hadn’t intended anyone to come across the site, but because it was standards-compliant, Google could see it.
• All it takes for something to ‘go viral’ on the web is for the right person (in this case Andy) to tweet about it.
• People put a lot of faith in the appearance of websites, perhaps too much. Because it looked legit, people happily signed up and handed over their contact details (which I won’t be abusing, don’t worry). It’s just as well that internet scammers don’t tend to have great design skills!

So… I guess all’s well that ends well. Thanks to all those who have been complimenting the site and passing it on, and apologies to anyone who was accidentally duped by the site. If you signed up by mistake leave a comment and I’ll send you a link to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

Update 25/02/10: The TickTalk site has been featured on Styleboost! Seeing as it’s the main gallery site I visit, I’m pretty chuffed.