The background shouldn't be a problem. One colleague of mine has a petit hand and didn't work reliably. Will be interested to know if it works on a mobile device.
Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.
No doubt Barry Schwartz has never lived without choice. He's wrong, and obviously so. Freedom of choice is vastly superior, in every possible way, to the alternative.
The stories are overly plentiful of people that were held in low-choice captivity in the former USSR, breaking down in tears upon seeing western grocery stores. I know several people who lived under Communism in Romania, their experience was identical. I'd suspect that very few people arguing against choice, have ever lived in a situation where they were actually deprived of it. They're essentially spoiled brats.
I think the key here is the Goldilocks principle: too little or no choice is bad, but so is too much choice. The key (from a marketing perspective) is finding just the right amount of choice that does not overwhelm, but gives a range of varying options. Other commenters have mentioned finding a sweet spot - Apple's x/y axis that leads to four product categories; trimming the number of potato chip options on the rack from 12 to 5 and seeing sales jump.
We've been using Socket.IO for years. It works well. Here is a Space Invaders demo we put together a couple of years ago. http://www.webdigi.co.uk/fun/space
Socket.IO let's you control space invaders on your desktop realtime mobile browser with websockets, long polling, etc.
