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Games Magazine Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008

GiftTRAP wins GAMES Magazine’s “Best Party Game of the year 2007/2008”

What's the idea?

Click here to find out how we’ve turned gift giving into a hilarious social experience

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Puts your gifts to the test!

GiftTRAP is the hilarious new game that’s taking the gaming world by storm and putting the social back into board games.

The goal is to really get to know your friends and family.

You win by knowing your friends and choosing the right gifts, but most of all it’s just fun to play and gets you talking about things that matter.

• 3-8 Players, 5+
• Playtime 45-75 mins
• Learn in 10 mins

• 1 full size game board
• 640 Gift Ideas
• Rules
• 8 Organza Gift Bags containing; scoring markers, gift & choice tokens plus advanced strategy cards

Love to play Trivial Pursuit, Cranium or Apples to Apples - You will love this family party game.

GiftTRAP is all the fun of Secret Santa without needing to shop or wrap.

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What kind of Gift Giver are you?

5 reasons to change the name of your Facebook App

Yes, you can change the name.  I guess there is a risk people will wonder what the apps is if you change the name too much.

I must confess, I’ve changed the name of our GiftTRAP app several times just to see if I can improve visibility in the Apps Directory. Do people really search the apps directory apart from people in the Facebook apps business. Probably not!

Our current name is GiftTRAP’s “Can you guess my ‘Bucket List’ game"

There are many reasons, but mainly were late to market. People are jaded on Facebook in so many ways. Here’s a few of the issues;

• Too Many invites
• Too Many Apps (30k)
• Apps usage has hit a plateau
• Too many copy cat apps
• Too many apps that do nothing of value

The name “giftTRAP” is well known in online board game community, but that’s a small sub segment of the global population of party game, so first I think we need to try and hook people into using our app and then teach them a little more about a real world cardboard board game. If you already have a crowd on Facebook (with an existing app) then it’s easy to get users for your new app, but building from zero is simply a hard slog.

Simply put we missed the whole early adoption Facebook wave. I wrote our app myself using Ruby on Rails (I had to learn it) and I’m no coding superstar, but I can get by. I had to switch from rFacebook to Facebooker (which delayed us further) and we’d began with a standalone all.

What’s interesting is that depite all the issues I still think a Facebook is proably better than having a standalone app. Whilst people are jaded on Facebook to more apps, they are even more jaded to registering for yet another service. It’s the better of all evils. With our original standalone app we found a lot of people would register with one of their email addresses and then send themselves a gift to another of their email addresses. I guess we are all so SPAM paranoid. What happened to the trust in this world? At least that doesn’t happen with a Facebook app.

Our app been through several iterations to figure how to translate an award winning game into an online game. Perhaps we’re not there yet, but to my mind our apps is unique, it actually does something and we have clusters of users who get it and play it a lot. I think we’ve got some cool stuff in the analytics especially when you play amongst a group of friends and compete to see who knows your mutual friends best.

Being a “Virtual Gifting” app is both a plus and a minus. On the positive side I’ve estimated that half a billion virtual gifts have been send across all the Social Networking platforms, ie people have heard of the concept. The downside is it’s easy to get lost in the noise. People who have a virtual gifting app of choice aren’t really looking for a replacement and perhaps were making it harder by doing something more. Our is actually a game and not just the idea of sending a virtual gift.

So i’ve always wanted to find a way to differentiate ourselves. Secret Santa is one way - it’s a quick connection. GiftTRAP is the “Santa” of board games. It’s funny but there are probably 20 or so Secret Santa app. Again were slightly different here. Our game is about giving virtual gifts and not about organizing the postage of physical items. That said it’s a bait and switch game - we’ve seen people opt to play GiftTRAP instead of Secret Santa - it’s just so much greener. Who needs some $5 gag gift to put out in the trash anyway.

So along comes The Bucket List. It’s an amazing coincidence but nearly all the things featured in the movie are in the game plus a whole lot more besides.

I’ve estimated 20 million people have seen The Bucket List. There are many people that get the idea of Secret Santa, but The Bucket List is so much more current and probably a better connection - as the focus is really about thinking about what you want in life and that’s really the focus of GiftTRAP.

It’s actually very hard to get your app out into the right social group (whoever they maybe). I must confess to not really feeling that I’m part of the FB generation, but I’m trying to learn, I guess it’s like trying to teach my old dad how to use a computer. This old dog hasn’t given up yet. I keep tweaking and fiddling and will continue to do so and it’s a lot of fun learning what works and what doesn’t

If I ever write a book on “The Story behind giftTRAP” it will be an interesting read. I’ll need a better title.

So back to the renaming, why?

1. Too many “Gift Apps” - it’s impossible to standout when there are 500+ apps themed around gifts. Amazingly there’s even an app to make Gift Apps which kind of explains point 1
2. GiftTRAP and “Bucket Lists” are a good fit. It kind of overcomes some of the materialism thoughts that GiftTRAP can communicate to those who haven’t played the board game
3. OK, so the Bucket List is a hot topic (although I’m late again)
4. It’s all about the Application Search Engine. Both the name and the 250 character description matter here. The sequence of words matter and it gives different weighting to the title vs the description. I’m shooting blind here as to my knowledge there’s no public data on what people search for on Facebook. So I don’t know what is key. There’s no public data on daily visits to specific groups. So I’ve tried to make my app name and my 250 character description work as hard as possible

Will it be the right thing? Time will tell. Perhaps there’s a few more tweaks along the way.

It’s all about timing and aiming to peak in time for The Holidays. There are many things that need to align to make this happen, but this seemed like a smart timely move to make.

I’ve also written some new copy for use on online sites to describe GiftTRAP in the context of Secret Santa and The Bucket List.

I’ll also be working on a few more posts around the Bucket List theme. I’m amazed just how many posting there are on the web about The Bucket List.

The good news is there’s 8000+ monthly active users on other “Bucket List” app ( I guess I could call it the official one). And there’s a similar number for the Movie page of the same name.

GiftTRAP is now on the first page for “Secret Santa” “Gift Exchange” and “Bucket List”

With 500 Gift Apps on Facebook I really struggle to get how this can be the case. Who are these people? Who does they perpetuate to use these apps? I’d love to know, to learn the bit I’m missing.

There are over 70 gift apps with 10,000 Monthly Active Users or more. What are these apps. There’s such specialization it’s amazing. There’s even a “Rotherham” gifts app which is small soccer team in northern England (no offense - I’m from Southport originally who’s club even smaller). I must confess to not having examined every single gift-app but I guess the economics must stack up.

What’s frustrating, but I can’t see a route through it is non of these apps have any reason to be in the “Gift Exchange” business for any other reason that ad revenue. We may have a legitimate product, but that’s kind of irrelevant. If you can’t beat it join them.