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Ask YC: Easter eggs for web apps?

7 points by thorax ↗ HN
It seems pretty rare for web apps to have easter eggs. Why is that? It felt a lot more common in desktop development than on webapps.

Am I just overlooking them? Or do they change more often once someone finds them?

Are you putting easter eggs in any of your web apps/sites?

18 comments

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noodle
because its a lot harder to hide them with web apps.
antirez
why? this is what I used: when an user searches for a given keyword in the search box (a very unlikely search but not impossible from time to time) the ester egg is activated (setting a cookie).

p.s. is it a problem of mine or hackernews is monkey asses slow?

ojbyrne
Digg has a couple. If you view source and go to the bottom of the page you'll see:

<!-- digg is done serving you. 2.01355321270u 137.03599911 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 6.6742x10-11m3kg-1s-2 --> those constants spell out (of course) digg. Barely an easter egg, but thought I'd throw it in.

There's a key-sequence that mimics a cheat from some game that will expand the comments completely. You can search digg for it if you're curious.

I think that because websites do change more often than desktop environments, people don't look for easter eggs with the same passion. And maybe because the effort involved in building and distributing a website is so much less than building and distributing a desktop application, that makes it more ephemeral, and programmers less likely to put in the time to build elaborate hidden functionality.

The constants thing was there for over a year before anyone noticed it.

asdflkj
Perhaps because easter eggs are a symptom of stifled creativity, which isn't as much of a problem with startups?
nilobject
I tend to think that Easter Eggs are a sign of creativity in and of themselves. In one of my unreleased desktop applications, we poured way more time into an Easter egg than we should have (and uncovered a very interesting way to DOS a mac). It's a fun creative outlet.
alaskamiller
He meant that people put easter eggs into applications because they hated the corporate drone work and used the eggs as a form of rebellion. Web 2.0 was suppose to free us all from that sort of drudgery.
eccp
I did it!

Open Firefox and go to http://adsl2.ctc.cl/adsl2/

See the Telefónica logo on the upper left? Click on the dot in the "i" on the logo to see the credits of the authors of the application.

huherto
It is nice to recognize the development team. Cual de ellos eres tu?
eccp
Denis Fuenzalida, the second on the list :-)
delano
It surprises me too! (Although I think it may have something to do with web applications still being in the adolescent phase where they're trying to prove themselves to the world.)

I built two easter eggs into YellowPages.ca and they survived for two years until I finally mentioned them to a business manager who I can tell you, did not find them amusing. You can still see the evidence though:

http://yellowpages.ca/search/si/1/invaders/space

What: invaders Where: space

They obviously don't see the marketing potential in "fun" searches.