OKCupid stole FriendlyRank.com creator's idea with their "MyBestFace" release
friendlyrank.com
friendlyrank.com
Are you interested in a “strategic partnership”?
Not if it involves us paying you.
Sure! But you won’t get anything for it, and we’ll keep it
to ourselves, and we’ll use it to make millions. Possibly.
You might want to keep your ideas to yourself.
Seriously though, if you think your idea is that great, you should write it on a little note and keep it in a shoebox. Then, within days, weeks but at most years you'll find that somehow someone seems to have had magical access to your shoebox and managed to read right through the cardboard.
How did they do that?
Don't tell anybody your ideas if they're that good, they'll run with it and might even do a better job than you yourself ever will...
Especially somebody that is in a position to implement your idea overnight and make a bundle while doing it, that's tying the proverbial cat to the bacon and expecting the bacon to be there in the morning.
Nice story about ideas and how to make money of them:
Two gentlemen showed up at a notary public to see if he had a solution to their dilemma.
The first was a well known businessman, the second an inventor.
The businessman made matchboxes and the inventor had come up with an idea to save money on the production of the boxes, but realized that if he gave his idea the businessman would implement it and not pay him.
So he named his price, asked the businessman to deposit the money with the notary, and if the idea upon disclosure would be implemented within 5 years the money would flow to the inventor, otherwise it would go back to the businessman.
The idea was simple as can be: "only put the 'rubbing surface' on one side of the box", instant savings.
The businessman immediately realized the potential and the money was released, both parties happy.
So if you wish to 'sell your idea' use some kind of escrow to make sure that you get what's due to you, and if you don't, don't bitch.
Great story. I wondered why we don't see more of this in the real world, then realized that one of the scenarios doesn't end well.
If the businessman doesn't like the idea, he doesn't get his money back for 5 years. Ouch.
A common way to do stuff like this is with a bank-guarantee, which means you're good for the money but the money is not actually taken out of your account until the transaction completes. Should you default on the payment the bank will pay up.
Otoh it also is a matter of how big the amount is. If the price is reasonable the businessman would likely take the risk.
Ideas are worth something, but by themselves not a whole lot, so the seller and buyer would both be acting on the assumption that the deal would be good for both of them if it went through. And the time could be shorter or longer, there is quite a bit of play in the concept to allow adaptation.
A key to success is staying competitive and always improving on what's available to your marketplace.
A better idea would be to implement this feature as an A/B test Automatically rotate through the pictures and see which picture gets the most responses.
They have the data to do this and it would avoid any idea origination conflicts (with FriendlyRank anyway).
[1] http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths...
People already use sites like hotornot for precisely this purpose. I'd be surprised if there aren't already half a dozen sites out there doing exactly this. Googling for "rate my photo" brings up an easy handful, I'm sure more than a few have a rank your photos functionality.
1. Cry. 2. Learn. 3. Move on.
There are several things you can cry poor sportsmanship for in business, this would not be one of them.
That said, I can't tell if they're truly bitter or just running with an opportunity for a marketing ploy that presented itself.
This is a big difference. If the purpose is to rate photos based on their effectiveness in a social networking environment, I'd much rather use implicit social network data rather than deal with low response rate & terribly biased data from explicit surveys.
In short, OKCupid seems to have a much better source of data to achieve the goals common to both FriendlyRank + MyBestFace.
They had nothing to license. They didn't have rights on any particular technology, and they certainly didn't have rights to all "ways to pick a good profile picture."
Even if this site does file a patent and get it, they likely STILL won't have the resources to then extract a licensing fee from anyone, as it isn't even clearly the same idea.