Quite frankly I'm shocked it has taken this long for someone to come out with this - Hot or Not for websites. If Digg/Propeller/Reddit/etc is a little too heady for you and you just want to vote a site up or down based upon how it looks, Web Hot or Not is for you.Created by Technorati founder David Sifry, the site is about as barebones as they come - there isn't even an 'About' page yet. All you get is a screenshot of a site and below that a scale of 1 to 10 of how "hot" it is. If you've ever used the actual Hot or Not site before, it's exactly the same. Once you vote, you are taken to a new site's screenshot to vote on while the last one you just voted on has it's "official rating" updated in the upper left hand corner. Best of all, you don't have to register to vote (it's not even an option).
The best part of this site is going to no doubt eventually be the comments. I can't wait to hear the anonymous masses rip into the way sites look. Has anyone submitted MySpace yet?
Anyone can add any site simply by clicking the 'Add site' link and putting in the URL. It takes a bit of time for a screenshot to be gathered for that submitted site.
The real question, as Mashable asks, is if this is meant to be just pure entertainment, or if this will in some way relate to Technorati? To me it seems entirely too vanity-based at the moment to be of any real use, so I would guess it's just meant to be a fun little exercise in site building. It's mindless web entertainment, you see a site, you vote, you get the next one, you vote, rinse, repeat.
[UPDATE]: As David Sifry confirms on his blog, the site is just meant to be a fun little experiment, though he does say "who knows where it'll go". His description of its genesis reminds me a lot more of StumpleUpon, which is actually more apt than Digg/Propeller/Reddit/etc I think.
7 comments:
Done already....http://commandshift3.com/
And might I say a lot hotter too.
Please correct the title of your blog post, MG. It should read: "It's Come to This: Hot or Not for Websites" (italics added for instructional emphasis).
Thanks much!
@anon - that site is at least a hundred times more complex (and much better looking), but I don't see it as exactly the hot or not clone like 'Web Hot or Not'.
@simone - thanks, corrected.
Yeah, it's about time someone did this; a nice superficial comparison of website "sex appeal". People seem to have entirely lost tight of the fact that web "design" is about making something functional AND nice to look at...
It's a nice idea. Too bad their screenshot capabilities aren't fast enough. It's mostly empty and sort of looks like some remnant of the 90's.
How many bloggers are now entering each and every post they ever had and voting 10?
How many spammers are doing the same?
First of all let's point out this is not a product and it's not David Sifry's next venture. It was born from an idea of Martin Varsavsky and David as a fun geeky spoof on hotornot to rank web sites and it was developed by the guys at FONlabs in Spain.
http://commandshift3.com/ is similar and looks very nice, but it focuses on design. WebHotOrNot should be not just about design, but also on how useful these websites are as services.
I work for Martin and I'm sure the guys at FONlabs will be happy to receive any suggestion to make the website more useful and fun (fonlabs@fon.com). They are already at work to make the screenshot generation much faster!
@salubri - sex appeal and the web huh? but yes, I see what you are getting at, the same thing I was in making fun of MySpace.
@charbarred - true on the screenshots, but psaccomani says below, they are working on that. that is a very good point about spammers trying to submit sites over and over, I hope they cut you off at one submission per domain.
@psaccomani - thanks for clarifying some of those things. maybe a suggestion would be a top 10 "hotties" list or something along those lines :)
Post a Comment