Foodfight - then and now
Food fighting has come a long way, and its quite intriguing to see how history repeats itself, and concepts continually evolve while maintaining an undercurrent of themes, values, rules, and such. Some are keen enough to identify those opportunities, quickly. Business 2.0 published an article, called “The man who started the foodfight“, highlighting Seth Goldstein’s new company, SocialMedia. Seth has an interesting way of becoming his surroundings, his ideas, his vision. I know Seth through his previous company that acquired the software company I co-founded.
What is quite interesting about the underlying concepts of SocialMedia is that it creates a true application of the social graph. The term application in Seth’s case is not just the concept of utility, but rather applying real -life social concepts into our online interactions. Granted, we can’t throw food, or shit in this case, at each other in real-life, it surely would be fun.
The key here is that foodfighting is not new. This online social interaction existed over ten years ago! If you remember BBS’ing (logging into Bulletin Board Systems), you remember everything from FidoNet to the text-based role playing games. That was about the same time I was playing Wolfenstein 3D and Hero’s Quest.
Surprise, surprise…one of the most popular games was Food Fight! I recall playing it in third grade (it’s too far back to keep track). Food fight was one of many games that ran on the BBS door “platform”, we can call it. Here’s the Food Fight logo — yes in ANSI!
You can still play the original version at this site or install the app in Facebook. From the early 90s, foodfight has made it into the new century and it’s hot as ever.
If I start whining about how I didn’t see this coming or act on it, I might as well do the same for email, chat, portals, search, and everything else. But this continues to encourage me that there are new undiscovered territories to apply learnings from history.
