Nominate BabeVsBabe for the Crunchies!
Every day, this website helps thousands of people waste what would otherwise be productive hours. If you’re one of these grateful people, please nominate BabeVsBabe for the Best Time Sink Crunchie by clicking the badge below!
Your support will help me further my mission of making BabeVsBabe the biggest time-wasting website out there. 
Thanks everyone!
Venture capital firms aiming lower
VC firms like Y Combinator, Google Gadget Ventures, and Bay Partners are offering funding on a smaller scale for developers. For example, Bay Partners’ AppFactory provides funding for developers of Facebook apps — investments from $25,000 to $250,000. It’s a far cry from the days when VCs wouldn’t pay any attention to your startup unless millions of dollars were involved.
My thoughts on this: if you need that little money for your startup, go with an angel investor or fund it yourself, and retain 100% of your company when you make it big.
Facebook Platform’s greatest asset
I’ve read a lot of posts and comments around the blogosphere that the Facebook Platform is the new AOL. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but it’s not too far from the truth. If the AOL comparison sounds harsh, bear in mind that AOL was successful for a while.
It still remains to be seen whether the Facebook Platform will blossom into more than a glorified platform for controlled widgets, whether the “Social OS” concept will stick, and whether applications will actually make any money. If there’s a fighting chance, it’ll be from applications that leverage Facebook’s existing user networks. Facebook’s greatest asset is their user database: I would hazard to guess that they have the most accurate and trusted database of personal profiles and relationships on the web. It’s not Identity 2.0 utopia by any means, but it’s the biggest and best database of trust relationships that exists today, and being able to tap into that as a developer is huge.
There’s a lot of hype surrounding Facebook Platform, but you can’t say it’s not warranted.
Your reward for writing a wildly successful Facebook app: $60,000 and a job
This article from Reuters pretty much confirms my belief that it’s hard to make money on Facebook. Despite the massive amount of hype surrounding Facebook applications, a wildly successful Facebook app, like Favorite Peeps with 1.6 million users, is worth a piddling $60,000 and a job at Slide. Granted, it’s not a bad payday considering how much effort was required to build Favorite Peeps, but the developers got in on the ground floor — forget duplicating that kind of success now, because all of the simple ideas for Facebook apps have been done, and creating anything that successful again is going to require a lot more effort.
I’m not sure if the creators of Favorite Peeps or SuperPoke should have sold out to Slide. I can think of a few things to do to innovate and expand those apps to generate more advertising revenue. It’ll be interesting to see what Slide does with Favorite Peeps and SuperPoke to generate revenue. Come to think of it, how does Slide generate revenue? Do they make any money at all??Ignoring the Naysayers
Not being from the Bay area, I’ve never had the experience of being in the thick of Silicon Valley, but from what I’ve heard, it’s an amazing breeding ground for new tech companies because everyone around you is extremely supportive of even the craziest ideas. The vast majority of them don’t succeed, but if even 1% of a million ideas are successful, you get Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc. Not only that, but there is a level of respect for entrepreneurs simply for having the guts to go out and do their thing.
Unfortunately, this isn’t so much the case outside of Silicon Valley. I’ve had more than one naysayer tell me they don’t think I can turn Babe Vs Babe from a one-man hobby (which is how they see it) to profitable venture.
This post by Clay Shirky at Many2Many sums up my observation: “When I see students or startups thinking up something crazy, and I want to explain why that won’t work, couldn’t possibly work… I have to remind myself to shut up for a minute and just watch, because it may be me who will be surprised when I see what color comes out of the bag next.” Unfortunately, even some of the most successful people I know don’t share Mr. Shirky’s insight.
The Cycle of the Tech Bubble
It’s interesting to hear someone in the thick of the industry (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch) grousing on how there’s too much VC money flowing through Silicon Valley, causing people to lose sight of the products and the technology. And he’s right, when the big money investors (who may or may not necessarily be interested and knowledgable about the technology) swoop in, suddenly it becomes all about money and not the products and the good clean fun of entrepreneurship.
I’m not saying big money is always bad, but there are startup ideas that require big money, and ones that don’t. I would guess that most tech startups don’t need the millions of dollars that are thrown their way. My buddy Jeff’s Eqo mobile VOIP startup, which could completely change the telecommunications game? Sure, they need the millions. But a site like Digg, who’ve received, at my last count, $11M in funding — do they really need $11M to do what they do?
It’s pretty clear to me that we’re seeing another tech bubble — though not as severe as the last one, which was littered with countless IPOs and affected a lot of small investors outside of the industry. We’re a lot more cautious this time around. But we’re still seeing a lot of private investment money thrown around irrationally, and when the bubble bursts, VC money will dry up again and lavish launch parties will once again be a thing of the past. That is, until the next bubble forms and the cycle begins anew. 
Flickr is #1 because of soft porn. Suddenly I want to visit more often
Despite the perception of Flickr as a high-brow photo sharing site, much of its popularity can be attributed to searches for soft porn.
The interesting (and obvious) thing about this is that, well, people like porn — it’s helped Flickr grow to the size it is today. (To paraphrase Dr. Cox from Scrubs, if all the porn disappeared from the Internet, all the Internet would be is one site and it would be called, “Bring back the porn”.) Still, despite the surge in traffic I’m sure I’d see, I have little desire to turn Babe Vs Babe into a porn site… there are already plenty of those out there.
Virtual gifts - why they just might work
James Hong, one of the founders of HotOrNot.com, emailed GigaOM yesterday to announce that they are doing away with paid subscriptions to their “Meet Me” dating site. Instead, they’re turning to a mostly ad-based revenue model, as well as selling virtual gifts.
The concept of virtual gifts is a brilliant idea — even Facebook is trying to get in on the action too, testing their own virtual gifts. It’s a concept that’s been proven to work in international markets with sites like Cyworld, but whether it will catch on en masse in North America is another question. A quick survey of the discussion out there shows most people are pretty negative on the idea. Where it might stand a chance, though, is if there are enough guys out there willing to shell out money to get the attention of girls — and if girls don’t find virtual gifts cheesy, tacky, or just plain stupid. Put it another way, it’s a concept that will work only for dating purposes. Hence, it’s probably not going to work for Facebook, since Facebook isn’t a dating site per se (at least nobody thinks of going to Facebook for that reason). It just might, however, work for HotOrNot.
With paid (and even free) dating sites losing subscribers to free social networks, making themselves free was a move that HotOrNot had to make to survive. The problem with free, though, is that it attracts the looky-loos, unemployed bums, players, stalkers, etc. When real money is involved, you can weed out the guys and girls who aren’t serious about meeting people. For HotOrNot, virtual gifts could go a long way to filling that gap they left by going free.
The most accurate and effective way of objectifying women (and men)
It suddenly struck me this morning that the Condorcet method of voting (which is what Babe Vs Babe uses) is superior to simply choosing a score between 1 and 10, at least when it comes to mass Internet voting. Intuitively I always knew it was a better voting system, but up until now I had never put much thought into trying to explain why. Yeah, I know I’m just slightly biased since I run this site, but hear me out….
The main problem with the “1 to 10” rating sites is that a lot of people will simply click “1” or “5” to get to the next photo. And even if they do put some honest thought into what number to rate, different people have different standards: some people will rate consistently high, most people will rate consistently low. The “1 to 10” rating sites out there that don’t have a bias term have consistently low scores for all of their photos, while the smarter ones have a bias term to scale the scores up. If they didn’t, users would get discouraged and would stop submitting their photos.
Babe Vs Babe, on the other hand, forces you to make a choice between a pair of candidates. There’s no ambiguity; one is always hotter relative to the other. The site was started on a whim as something fun to do, but if you want to get serious about it (well, as serious as one can get while gawking at hotties and rating them ), the Condorcet method is simply a better ranking system than a numeric scoring method.
Another great thing about the Condorcet method is that it takes less brain power to simply click on the hotter of two hotties, than to assign a number between 1 and 10. Perfect for when you’re drunk or stoned off your ass. Truly, Babe Vs Babe is great mindless entertainment.
How big can a website grow if it’s only run by one person?
Here’s a free plug for Markus Frind’s blog and his dating site, Plenty Of Fish. I don’t know him personally, but he’s done a fantastic job of building his website and growing it to become one of the premier destinations for free dating. If you’ve never heard of him, he shot to personal fame last June when he took a picture of his AdSense check — nearly $1 million for two months of traffic. That he was able to create and market his website on his own is even more amazing, and it’s inspiring to see. I build Babe Vs Babe entirely in my spare time (which isn’t much considering I also have a 9-5 job) and if I can get even a fraction of the eyeballs that Plenty Of Fish gets, I’ll be very happy. Markus has proven that you don’t need a lot of VC money these days to start something big.
del.icio.us
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Yahoo! My Web
Reddit