While ChumpDump itself may never make its creators rich, the user information it is now pouring into a central data base just might pay off.
The concept for the Twitter-related game germinated during Startup Weekend Columbus 2010, an April event that brought the entrepreneurial-minded together for three days of brainstorming and fleshing out of new ideas for startups, says Dan Rockwell, co-founder of ChumpDump and CEO of Columbus-based Big Kitty Labs.
"I wasn't interested in jumping on another team," Rockwell says of that weekend. But a light bulb went off while chatting with colleagues about a company Twitter managed to shut down for enabling bulk, automatic "unfollows" of Twitter friends.
"We were laughing about that, and we thought we can make something faster and easier than that, and we'll do it nice and novel and wrap it in a game. We'll call it ChumpDump."
ChumpDump debuted for iPhone and Google Android earlier this month. Within two weeks, 500 people were playing. Each day, ChumpDump picks a name randomly from your friends list and scours through a month of tweets. It tells you how many times your friend sent you a direct message, how many times he or she retweeted your tweets, number of replies to your messages and other factors that enable you to answer this question: "Save or dump?"
Three points for saving -- and three points for dumping. More importantly, Rockwell says, players must give a reason why they are saving or dumping a friend.
The free game is unlikely to create much revenue, says Rockwell, but that's OK. The project helped its creators gain new capabilities in game mechanics, leader board design, in-game ads, Android development and in-game purchasing. And, as ChumpDumpers grow in number, the rich information concerning why people choose to save or dump could become a data mine worth its weight in iPhones.
Source: Dan Rockwell, ChumpDump
Writer: Gene Monteith