Hot babe of the moment
My personal favorite girl of the moment…
A “skip” button?
I’ve been asked to put a “skip” button on the website to skip a battle, for those times when you really can’t decide which of the two babes to pick.
I’m not all that opposed to the idea, but A) there’s no space on the page for it, and B) it would sort of defeat the purpose of the Condorcet voting method… maybe you don’t find either babe attractive, but you gotta pick the lesser of the two evils, otherwise less attractive photos wouldn’t get as many votes, and the battles wouldn’t average out properly.
Having said that, I’ll pull this stick out of my ass and let you in on a little tip: if you want to skip a battle, just click the BabeVsBabe logo or refresh the page. Ta-da!
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.
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