HOTorNOT.com offers a simple and democratic answer to a common but embarrassing question: how good do I look? Voters play a kind of whack-a-mole, only they whack human beings instead of moles, and use a mouse instead of a mallet, rating each candidate on scale of 1 to 10. Soon as one gets rated, another pops up next to a thumbnail of the last one, with the current rating. It's easy to spend
The site was conceived in October 2000 by James Young and Jim Hong, a couple of 27-year old Berkeley-trained hackers, roommates and drinking buddies. They were going to put it up on XMethods, their Web site for publicly available Web services.
For what instantly became obvious reasons, they made HOTorNOT.com an independent site. In just over a week, the site was getting almost two million pageviews per day. By May of this year, HOTorNOT had counted over 2.1 billion votes, and had over one million user accounts.
But here's what's really hot: It runs on Linux. "In fact," James Hong recently told us, "we couldn't have done it without Linux." By "it," he means make money. According to Hong, HOTorNOT pulls in more than enough income to pay for itself and its staff, which still consists of the original two guys.
That's because they've adapted quickly. "When the advertising business began to crash, we added a paid 'meeting' service to the system." The result was countless dating success stories, including more than a few marriages. But the most important success story is HOTorNOT's own.
"HOTorNOT is a viable business built entirely on Linux," Hong says. More specifically, "Linux (Red Hat), Apache, MySQL and PHP on thirty-five 1U 1u rackmounts, mostly from Rackable Systems." (See picture.)
A final perspective. The number of users with keyword "Linux" is 268. The number of users with keyword "Windows" is 12.
- Doc Searls
Note: there are three pictures in the directory.
