The idea behind www.hotornot.com is very simple. You see pictures of boys or girls and you have to give them a mark from 0 to 10. This is simple and very time killing when you are bored in the office. Of course, there is no adult content.
Well... Hotornot has been cloned zillions of times:
Just to mention some examples:
"How much do I rock?", which is part of the famousning. Ning is a site which allows you to create your own social network. In other words, ning allows you to create your hotornot without writing any single line of code.
Mackable: created in 2006, this clone really improves the aesthetic and usability of hotornot. However most pictures are more provocative
This is not really a hotornot but in this page you can find links to sites where you can download or buy for much less than 1600 million USD the source code of a flikr clone, youtube clone, netvibes clone...
The is one application that stands out from all the others: hotcaptcha. It is so genuine!!
You know every time you create an account in some site, you find a picture with some blur text you have to enter to prove that you are a human and not a machine. Well the approach of hotcaptcha is funnier. You have 9 pictures of boys/girls and you have to choose the three of them who are good looking.
Does it really make sense to clone hotornot?
Postcript:
I would really like to know if there are some Chinese hotornot. I am sure that Chinese celebrities like Furong Jiejie (芙蓉姐姐) would love it (haha!). If you know some please leave a comment or tell me on the blue instant messaging gadget on this blog.
By the way did you know that hotornot inspired Chad Hurley and Steve Chen to create youtube? didn't you? Then, read this article from the New York Post
Like evil Gargamel in the picture, we wonder: Would it be a good idea to copy hotornot into other languages?
Like smurfs for dinner, i think the answer is yes. Reasons:
- It shouldn't take very long to make a simple working version.
- We don't know that much about how startups really work. This would be a great sandbox to play and learn techniques, technologies, marketing strategies, adsense and much more. We would get hands on experience.
- It won't take big investments apart from buying a few domain names.
- We can always drop the idea at any stage, and if it becomes successful and we need VC money it will be easier to get.
- We will be more prepared and more experience to face other future projects.
At the end of the day, there's nothing to lose. It will be fun and interesting.
The idea behind www.hotornot.com is very simple. You see pictures of boys or girls and you have to give them a mark from 0 to 10. This is simple and very time killing when you are bored in the office. Of course there is no adult content.
Hotornot business model is currently based on free services with AdSense. Before AdSense existed their business model was like a paying dating site like meetic or match.
Hotornot is only in English.
Imagine a Spanish hotornot where you can rank Betty la Fea. Or instead, lets imagine the easy approach of hotornot with funny pictures like those from tonterias.com. Sometimes I spend hours watching these funny pictures when bored.
Or let's imagine a Chinese hotornot. Do you think this kind of approach would work in China? or you think Chinese people would not spend time on this? or on the contrary, is this absolutely anti Chinese?. I will find out. (I am traveling to Shanghai the day after tomorrow). By the way, read this very interesting post in Web 2.0 Asia about "Your China Strategy".
Do you think it would be a good idea to clone? Do you think it is respectful to clone a successful application? Would you fill proud of it if you are successful? Personally I do not know how I would feel. would you quit your job to implement this? uhm...
Please tell us what you think about this by using the comments of this blog.
- Interesting article about new Facebook API and how too much love may kill you (love from users, that is). Basically it says that the great insight of Facebook is to become an 'open' platform for apps, and that if your app is there and gets virally extended, the growth might be so brutal that your servers won't be able to cope with it unless you have good resources.
- I got to that article through James Hong's blog . James Hong is one of the co-founders of hotornot , that website where you can rate people's pictures and say whether you find them hot or not. Simple and effective. James Hong says the killer app in hotornot is the people. User generated content to the rescue.
I heard from hotornot several months back, and saw James Hong recently in that churchill club panel video on Guy Kawasaki's blog. Everything falls into place like a giant cosmic jigsaw puzzle.
Ok, but what has all this have to do with the post's title? I was thinking of meneame, pretty successful spanish website which some people despise as being a copy of digg. Not me. I find beauty in there. It's not simply a copy, you have to do it well to succeed. It is a story of a local solution well implemented. English language is not everything.
Ideas Why not localize sites through 'creative plagiarism'. Why not 'copy' and adapt sites to local needs, sites with simple ideas behind, like hotornot, plentyoffish -another dating site- or others popular ones into spanish or maybe chinese (huge market?). Think of baidu in china, very very similar to google but much more popular there. Oh, that misterious and intriguing chinese connection!
Am I evil for suggesting all this? Please don't judge me, just love me. Be like a chameleon. Or like Bruce Lee put it, 'Be water, my friend'.
Coming to our discussion about 
The is one application that stands out from all the others: 
Like evil 
I've found a couple of interesting things today:
