April Fools TachyCache Recap

Many of you saw our release of TachyCache on April 1st.  It was WP Engine’s first April Fools joke, and the whole team had fun putting it together.   I wanted to share some of the results of the joke with you all, particularly all our friends in the WordPress community that we reached out to for a Retweet or a short blog post.  If you scroll to the bottom, I’ve embedded the hilarious tweets that came throughout the day.

To come up with TachyCache, the sales and marketing teams scheduled a short meeting to work out the details of the April Fools joke with Jason, our founder.  We pitched a few ideas around, and settled on “TachyCache.”  Without going into painful nerdy details, TachyCache takes its name from the eponymous tachyon, which is controversial theory in the scientific community that is being studied at CERN because it is a hypothetical particle capable of travelling faster than the speed of light.  This means that the particle could potentially arrive in “negative time,” that is, a tachyon from the future could travel to you so quickly that it would arrive before it left.  Pretty amazing.  Imagine a WordPress host that was capable of caching a page in “negative time.”

I drafted the TachyCache press release based on notes about dilation fields and other greatness from Jason.  Trafton and Taylor sent emails to folks asking for re-tweets and posts of TachyCache.  Lots of WordPress developers and folks with sites on WP Engine retweeted our fake announcement.  We usually responded on twitter, “We knew you were going to tweet that.  TachyCache told us.”   Mason James even posted a great article about TachyCache on WPMU.

For a Sunday news release, the results were great.  There were dozens and dozens of tweets all day long, and continued into Monday evening.  TachyCache tripled our normal Sunday traffic.  Based on the responses on twitter (see below) and Facebook, it was a great joke that our customers had a great time with. Not bad for an April Fools joke.

Since Storify finally released their WordPress plugin, I can include the best TachyCache tweets that we collected.  Scroll below to see what the conversation was like.

WP Engine has announced a new WordPress caching technology capable of serving pages the instant before a visitor arrives at the site. WP Engine is calling the new caching system TachyCache, after the subatomic particle that moves faster than the speed of light.

http://storify.com/WPEngine/introducing-tachy-cache