Critical Mass

Using tools like Nabble, TweetScan, etc, I'm able to get an idea of when people talk about Monkeybars. Since David Koontz and myself released it, it's been on the rise in terms of buzz. Initially, I was doing a lot to make sure the flame stayed lit for Monkeybars, but now others are adding wood to the fire. I'm still doing a lot of the buzz for Monkeybars, but my cut of the work keeps getting smaller and smaller. I wonder if a critical mass will be achieved, and Monkeybars will carry itself on its own momentum?

There's a few things I've done to stoke the fires, but it's mostly just blabbing about Monkeybars when there's someone talking about a related topic (such as GUI development, or Ruby on the desktop). On this blog, I try to link back to Monkeybars on the first mention of it in a given post. I also watch some keywords on some mailing lists. Common sense applied, I throw in a plug for Monkeybars. The same approach is applied to some IRC channels I frequent, and on Twitter.

Advertising is tangential to my topic, but it's pretty key to understand how to generate that buzz. "If you build it, they will come" implies we live in a world where merit alone is appreciated. Just think about that for a second. Does that match your understanding of the real world? Advertising - for open source, for profit, whatever - is not evil. I am advertising here, but that's ok. I'm telling people (when relevant) about a tool I sincerely believe will help them. What's wrong with that? Replace 'tool' with 'product' and nothing changes.

Another thing I've done to help promote the tool is keeping on the mailing list and opening up the wiki. This has provided a lot of documentation for other users, and allows folks to get their questions answered when they've been asked before. A lot of bugs can be forgiven with these project/community management tools in place.

Other people are really jumping in and adding momentum to Monkeybars. Currently, Monkeybars's mailing list has people other than the core developers answering each other's questions. The wiki is full of tidbits, and I've only written one page (maybe a 1.25 pages if you count edits). I'm seeing users occasionally mention Monkeybars in the Ruby-Talk mailing list as a recommendation to others. People I've never met prior to seeing their work have done talks at conferences about Monkeybars, which wound up online for all to see. I've even seen JRuby users mention us in the same breath as Rails, as if we're the production desktop framework/library for Ruby.