About a month ago, right before SXSW, we quietly launched the new IconBuffet. For those in the dark, IconBuffet is a site we originally built about 4 years ago to sell surplus icons we had created as stock. While we still sell stock icons at the Buffet, over the last year the site has taken a major left turn.

It all started with a walk in the park in October 2005. I had this random idea to build a new IconBuffet site that would allow members to collect and trade free icons, much like baseball cards. There are a ton of other great free icon sites out there, but I wanted there to be more to IconBuffet than just a bunch of pages with ZIP files to download.

Sparked with that idea, Scott and I built the first iteration of the modern IconBuffet in about six weeks. We also launched a new RoR-based shopping cart at that time that has been copied and imitated by others countless times over. We launched that version of the Buffet on November 30, 2005, and 15 months later over 80,000 folks had become IconBuffet members.

The only problem was that we had never anticipated that level of success. Within days of our original launch dozens of ad-hoc forum threads had sprouted around the web with hundreds of people trading our icons collections (called Free Deliveries). We scrambled to build our own forum, and as the days, and then weeks, drifted by it became apparent that we would most definitely need to rebuild it all again in order to meet the growing needs of the IconBuffet community.

After Keegan joined us in July 2006, we chained him to his desk and had him start work on a new design for the site, centered more around the community than the icons themselves. New ideas cropped up in my head, and IconBuffet started to look less and less like an icon site and more like a game. We came up with some "rules" and foundations for the game, and late in 2006 began fleshing out the new site.

Instead of simply getting new icons each month, now each member gets an allotment of "Tokens" — almost like an allowance. You can even get more Tokens each month by upgrading to IconBuffet VIP. Tokens are then used as a currency that allows you to trade for any number of the Free Deliveries available at the Buffet. Of course you still have to find someone willing to send you the Free Deliveries you want. And like any good modern social network, IconBuffet allows you to build friendships and invite your buddies.

Successful trades and inviting friends will earn you points. Points will eventually translate into other perks and prizes, as well serve as a general status system. Of course, this layer of complexity definitely adds to the commitment level required to "collect them all!" But its a whole heckuvalotta fun. It makes me feel happy how much I enjoy wasting time on my own site playing the game as well.

And of course, there's the icons themselves. They're fun to collect, but they're free for general use as well. If you need some decoration for your blog, myspace, or whatever else your thing is on the web, IconBuffet is a great place to look. Some of my favorites include our Oslo collections, as well as our recent additions, Manhattan Me, Marseilles Value Meal, and Taipei Tiny. What's not to like with names like those?

So here we are a month removed, and I think it's safe to say this experiment is a wonderfully insane success. We've squashed the early bugs, made improvements here and there, and all-in-all polished the game mechanics. We've also decided we're going to invest even more time into creating free icons for the Buffet, as it's now plainly obvious that the more icons and people there are on the site, the more the fun grows. If you have signed up yet, you really should. There is much more fun in store.