I'm now starting to understand why the YC motto is "make something people want", rather than "make something useful".

From pg's essay: (opened my eyes to this)

"Wealth is what people want. I don't mean that as some kind of philosophical statement; I mean it as a tautology.

So an idea for a startup is an idea for something people want. Wouldn't any good idea be something people want? Unfortunately not. I think new theorems are a fine thing to create, but there is no great demand for them. Whereas there appears to be great demand for celebrity gossip magazines. Wealth is defined democratically. Good ideas and valuable ideas are not quite the same thing; the difference is individual tastes."

http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

At some point, a man, regardless of his convictions, has to stop getting into arguments with reality.

Bread and circuses it is, then.

The people who want this will want it for about 15 minutes, then they'll want something else. It's a fad.

If they pay for it within those fifteen minutes, that is all that matters.

Only if your goal is to win the lottery. What's left after the last iFart has puttered out?

The Chia Pet is still selling. The Pet Rock isn't.

But I heard the guy made a million dollars.

so someone is going to focus on building that next thing people will want; and however stupid it will be it will probably profit.

everyone should watch the movie idiocracy....that's where we are heading at breakneck speeds

Steve Jobs:

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.02/jobs_pr.html

I have to say that the security feature of the app appeals to me somehow. If I had an iPhone I might buy iFart just for that. It certainly gives new meaning to the phrase "someone ripped off my iPhone..." anyway.

I suspect the revenue will continue to spike over the next few weeks as new iPhone/iTouch owners get acquainted with their devices.

I also suspect that with these numbers an iBelch app must be in the works.

The team who launched iFart is an example of how the success (you can call it that - $0.99 is perfect price for people seeing it in AppStore on their new iPhones - will be very difficult to unseat iFart) was probably not an accident.

http://friendfeed.com/joelcomm

I'm wondering how accurate this article is. I'm an iPhone developer, and the iTunes connect website where you monitor your download statistics has been down since the 24th for a 4 day scheduled outage. It's still down now: http://itunesconnect.apple.com/. I can't see any possible way they could know how many downloads they've had.

https://itts.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/Piano.woa has worked even while iTunes Connect has been down

If the app contacts their web servers after it gets installed or in the course of use.

We do this with our iPhone games, like Raptor Copter (hunt velicoraptors in your Chinook helicopter!). It's part of our achievements/leaderboards framework, so we kept it in, but it also lets us compare the total number of sales to total iPhone device ids in our database. Piracy isn't a big problem, and we generally don't care anyway, but the data is available.

We had the scrolling LED sign in our office rattle off sales in real-time, which was fun for awhile.

As a quick piracy note, you can also detect pirated iPhone apps this way: http://thwart-ipa-cracks.blogspot.com/2008/11/detection.html

Back to iFart--I can't imagine many people would pirate a farting $0.99 app, versus a more expensive, more popular game. Maybe 1% or less?

That's quite useful, thanks!

I think people here read too much into outliers.

I will never be rich.

probably not

The virtual beer looks to be doing well too, at $1.99.