Though there was some success with Renkoo’s previous applications with Facebook, when it came to Myspace, the demographic was entirely different. The typical Myspace user is much less interested the socialgraph of their network, and more drawn to having “bling†for their profile.
I designed and executed Carshow from the ground up. The premise of the application is simple: you choose a car, pick it’s color, and customize it with a number of accessories (wheels, bumpers, decals, etc). You can display it on your profile, rate other user’s cars, and even race it in a flash-based drag racing application.
The results were outstanding: with no advertising or publicity behind it, in the few weeks after it launched it became one of the top 40 Myspace apps (and the number 1 automotive application), and was steadily climbing… all based on it’s own virality.
The Carshow application was built using javascript and OpenSocial on the frontend, and PHP on the backend. For the car image generation, I used PHP’s imagick extension, and came up with some interesting techniques for compositing the car images.
