

OkCupid stole my idea before I even thought of it - Goosey

I recently became single and being a startup geek decided to try my luck in OkCupid's waters. Unsure of which profile pictures to use I decided to try an A/B test of sorts.<p>This is the plan I today hatched for my evening of hacking:<p>First.. Pull together potential candidates for the profile photo.<p>Then write scripts to: 
1 - Upload them all to a photo hosting site.
2 - Register a 'throwaway' email for each photo.
3 - Create some MechTurk HITs to do the registration for on HotOrNot. One account per photo so that my testing happens in parallel.
4 - Once every few days run MechTurk HITs to harvest the # votes and avg rating for each photo, shove them into a spreadsheet.<p>It sounded like great fun until my RSS bleeps and I see OkCupid has added a new killer feature: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface<p>So.. cheers to OkCupid for saving me a night of coding (and dramatically improving on my idea besides)
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ig1
There's a lot of website analytic tools that like A/B that could be applied to
dating. How about mouse tracking to figure out what turns off readers, or
dynamic reordering of profiles based upon viewer,

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Goosey
Clickable link: <http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface>

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blahedo
Nice. My first thought that it was Ponzi in nature (relying on increasing
uptake to "staff" the judgements), but then I realised that if each uploader
has to make several judgements themselves, that should be enough to fuel the
operation.

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Goosey
Currently they seem to be running into a bit of a supply issue. I keep
'running out of people to pick'. It looks like you need something along the
lines of (number_of_pics * 20) votes to get your rating back, so they have a
bit of an inflationary issue.

It probably doesn't help that I am male and voting on female pics. My
intuition is that more males are participating in uploading/voting, so there
is a gap in female picture supply.

