Fame is Free!

We’ve made a few more tweaks to the site and we’re happy to announce that Fame is now Free. Free Famers will be put at the bottom of the page, but they will still have the opportunity to get themselves out of the Enquirer and up to A-Listers in People. Serious celebrities need not worry, these new celebs won’t encroach on your space unless they pay their way past you!

It’s exciting to offer so many people the opportunity for fame and we can’t wait to see the results. As always let us know if you have any suggestions or requests and we will try to meet your needs.

We still have some tricks up our sleeves!

Updates and Promotion

We’ve put a bunch of major updates on line, that should help to improve the FameThrower experience.

• Highlighting support; Mouse-over images on the front page and highlights give access to more information
• Info Pages: Now every celebrity can access detailed click data and peruse their peers.
• Upgrading: One can now increase their fame as much as they want. Just head to the info page and go from there.

This means that we’ve now fully entered the promotional stage. We’re taking our shot, using news aggregators, email and hopefully gaining foothold within the blogosphere.

As always, any help or advice on this subject would be greatly appreciated!

Features Galore

We are working as fast as we can to roll out the new features. Hopefully they will be live later tonight or tomorrow and the whole process should become more clear. Viewing the front page, getting more info and linking to your current celebrity status will all be a breeze!

On another note, today was also the first day that people we don’t know started to use the Web site. It’s quite a thrill to see the new photos and links coming in, and watching FameThrower react. It’s nice to know that people have faith in our system. Let’s hope that even more people sign up tomorrow!

Launch Plus 1

So far we have 9 celebrities up on the big board. We are really happy with how things are moving along and we’re glad to report that the idea seems to be working. We’re closely monitoring the number of views to the front page and the number of clicks on each photo. For some reason, people seem to be finding the site and clicking through the links. We’re quite impressed, given the incredibly limited exposure we’ve had thus far. Maybe buying fame does work!

We’re going to put some cool features up soon to improve the overall FameThrower experience. Let us know what you want and if we think we can do it, we’ll give it the old college try.

We’re (A)live

So after many hard hours of late night laboring, the site is up and functioning (as far as we can tell). Check it out at www.famethrower.com! While it doesn’t look like anything special yet, once it starts filling up with pictures, it’ll be a real treat! As people quest for fame, the website reacts in real time — organizing and shuffling all the images to create a cohesive whole.

So, what is this crazy thing? Well, we’ve created an environment where the need for fame can be satisfied. Every picture on the site has a value (in USD). FameThrower sorts everyone by value and automatically resizes and repositions the pictures accordingly. So decide where you want to be positioned on the page and mouse over the other celebrities to figure out how it’ll cost you to get there (be careful though: there’s a bit of strategy related to the shape of the picture you choose). Once you’re ready, just upload, pay, and prosper. Attach your blog, website, or myspace page to your photo and you’ll soon be reaping the rewards of your new celebrity status.

What’s next? We’re planning on a word of mouth testing period through the weekend and then if all goes well, a big promotion push early next week. We want to make sure all the kinks are worked out and we’ll be adding a few more critical features to aid people in their quest for fame. We’re also going to make sure that we have clear and concise documentation, so that the site is as easy to use as possible.

Do let us know what you think! We really appreciate the feedback we’ve been getting so far. Post a comment or send us an email at helpus@famethrower.com.

As for that bubbly, we popped it and the cork almost hit our computer in the face. Whah-bam.

Laundry List

The last couple of days here at FameThrower have been so intense that we now dub them “The Era of Slight Musk”. In an attempt to improve productivity we took the drastic measures of not showering, changing or moving from our seats. While it has paid off with some headway on our secret algorithm we feel that we may have decreased our life spans and/or driven our friends and family away.

But, we would also like to report that we have decided to do our laundry and we think that our work environment will be a better place for it.

We would also like to thank those who sent bubbly, it was a great motivator because we have strict reservations about uncouth champagne drinking. We have not yet popped your bubbly, but it is currently chilling. **wink wink**

Super Secret

Our Super Secret algorithm is almost done and it may blow your socks off (ours are long gone). Once our algorithm is complete it will allow us to put the finishing touches on the rest of the site, and what’s more important than that? Then we’ll cut the ribbon and christen this baby. If you’d like to make a donation of some bubbly, feel free… we’ll put it to good use!

Why take the stairs when you can ride the elevator?

 

 

 

a graphical representation of the FameThrower process

Dragon Scales

Things have been hectic here are FameThrower. We have the site together and we are intensively testing our algorithms, render times and usability. We’re upgrading to better hosting, we’ve gone through a series of design revisions, and we may even have t-shirts ready for launch. The toughest challenge thus far has been getting the front page to render on-the-fly, taking in new input and immediately reformatting the page. We don’t want to give the whole shabang away, but know that the front page will be organized in a Dragon Scales format (and no, FameThrower has absolutely nothing to do with Dungeons and Dragons, unless you want it to). When FameThrower is up and running, it will be well worth the wait.

a little taste?

Tick Tock

Well it’s probably time that we admit that this is taking a little bit longer than expected. We’re really happy with how things are going and we’re incredibly close to be doing done, but we don’t want to put the site up too early and not have it function as it should.

I know that you’re all hungry to learn a little bit more about what FameThrower really is… and to put it simply, it is a web site filled with famous people where anyone will have the opportunity to project themselves to fame.

Here is one of the screens that’s almost done:

You can probably make out the numbers, that’s pretty much all I can make out too. Not to worry, it won’t be too long now. But then again I’m standing on the other side of the room.

Enjoy!

We’re getting close…

We were hoping to get the site up and running today but it looks like we’ll need at least another 24 hours. We know that this is an inconvenient truth, but we don’t want to put up the site and have our adoring fans be disappointed or worse: confused! Currently we are concentrating on keeping the web page readable, stylish, and easy to use.

We contacted the charity we plan on giving to earlier today, letting them know what FameThrower is all about. But for some reason they still haven’t called us back (it might be because we’ve been on the phone all day)! We’re hoping they get back to us soon, or we may have to move on to our second choice. And if that doesn’t work out, we may just take all this silly money and put it towards scratch tickets.

Yee-haa.