(YC Winter08) Addher.com goes Beta | Hacker News Reader

(YC Winter08) Addher.com goes Beta

techcrunch.com

33 pointsgabrielleydon22 comments

i cant wait to read the comments for this

The idea here is clearly whooshing over my head. I don't get why this is worth making.

Yeah, whats the added value over HotOrNot? It's executed very well, but at its core it seems like a HotOrNot knockoff. Can someone explain it to me?

Think distribution. HotOrNot is a single site, which coincidentally just sold for $20 million. AddHer is distributed across all social networks. It's all about distribution, and as the AddHer team executes the rest of their plans (whatever those may be), they'll have millions of users at their fingertips.

someone drank a bit too much "the widget is the platform" koolaid

The idea of embeddable-apps-in-a-box, or "the widget is the platform", seems pretty compelling to me. What are your reasons for thinking it's over-hyped?

I don't find the "most widgets are trivial" argument compelling; the large portion of the internet devoted to porn doesn't detract from the rest of it, and likewise, the uselessness of unpopular widgets doesn't detract from usefulness of popular ones.

I really like Google's widget advertising service that let you dive deep into content without leaving a page. For example, I watched all 6 video clips on a National Geographic widget ad for their new "6 degrees" show. I'd have never navigated to another page to do the same thing.

I think we're just at the beginning of widget up-take... but I could be wrong, and would like to hear the arguments from the other side (perhaps there good discussions of this elsewhere already?)

Didn't hot or not actually have revenue of several million dollars per year? I'm failing to see how this is making money. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it evolves going forward.

hey zach, this widget is just the start of what we are building. Our direction will be much clearer over the next few months. As is I would describe the current iteration of the site/widget as a link/photo exchange in the context of a hot or not game. The site generates a lot of traffic to our users myspace profiles and the analytics we provide them is pretty compelling. But to you (a clicker) its just a slick hot or not widget that links to girls myspace profiles. In fact go to the random voter widget and start surfing. If you like someone drop by their profile and say hi (and maybe add her). :)

http://www.addher.com/index.php?controller=randombattle

Thank you, that helps. Interested to see where you're going with this.

I like it. It's a simple starting point.

Good Linus quote:

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed.

Great job on the design and keeping it going at a quick pace. You'll definitely get some people addicted. The distribution model is clearly a winner. Good job, Addhers ;-)

I'm not quite sure I get the long term goals. Is there something beyond people adding themselves as a promotional tool?

Also, there's a typo: when you click on "Click here to visit me" after voting, visit me is "vist me"

I really feel like it's inevitable that stuff like this is going to catch on in a major way.

I think that an app that would allow people to create one-off games and polls could be even more popular.

Nice work!

Congrats. I like it.

I thought initially silly to not let men in, but now that i rethink it, its probably the right thing to do since women want to promote and men want to see hot chicks...

so women are attention whores and men are perverts?

:). At least I am fair against both sexes

one of the questions in the widget has a typo: "who get's more action" (for the ill informed, it should be "gets")

I think people are looking at the cleavage more. I certainly didn't notice the typo :)

I can see how this has huge revenue potential ala Hot or Not and a great potential to go viral. Catchy names (addHer, addmired) too! You should try harder not to look like another Hot or Not! The jittering photos are a little annoying!

love the design - great to see the standard menu of web 2.0 stuff (photo sharing) start to get a new twist

as people have pointed out the distributed approach could be v. powerful

big ups

Nice work, I see this getting a lot of traction

This is awesome, congrats to launching!

nice touch, launching on v-day

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