Million Dollar Fame Page!

Naturally, people have been equating FameThrower to the Million Dollar Homepage. For those unfamiliar with the Million Dollar Homepage, a guy decided he could make a million dollars by selling 1 million pixels of ad space for $1 per pixel. And he did.
When a get rich quick scheme succeeds, there’s bound to be a slew of “copycats”. Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I’m astounded by stupidity of these imitators.
Here’s a lovely excerpt from the Frequently Asked Questions on UnitedStatesOfAMillion.com:

Are you worried about copy-cats/rip-offs?
Not really. I mean, to be fair, I adapted someone else’s idea as my basic concept didnt I? Although, I did not duplicate the whole product and make it mine. Like I said, no copy-cats sites would become as successful as the original one. This whole thing is about creativity and innovation, and it’s the very core reason why an idea works or achieves its objectives. If you take that away, it’s just not gonna work, so personally, I wouldn’t waste my time on it.

Didn’t duplicate the whole product, huh? Even the tagline (“Own a … Piece of Internet History”) is ripped off. The “new” idea this guy had was to put a map of the United States in the background. Pretty clever. So clever that he’s managed to sell an amazing two ads — to himself!

I shouldn’t be so negative; it’s not like FameThrower is the height of creativity (though I don’t know of another site quite like it). FameThrower is also based on a fairly ridiculous idea. But hey, we had fun making it and we’re helping a good cause. And it just so happens that we’re MAKING PEOPLE FAMOUS!

Up and Running Again

After a hairy couple of hours the server is back up and we are running at 100%. Sorry about all the confusion everyone, and don’t worry we’re doing everything in our power to prevent future outages.

Server Problems

Well it appears that right after we sent out a pretty massive promotion, the server FameThrower is hosted on has gone down. We’re waiting for a reboot but unfortunately its out of our hands at the moment. We are supremely disappointed with the this and apologize for this inconvenience. We are doing everything in our power to fix this problem.

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.

Stress Testing, The Big Decisions

Things at FameThrower are ripping along! We have the majority of the site together and we are stress-testing the areas of the site that are already complete. Design has been coming along just as we hoped, it’s a crisp, clean, easy interface that should lend it self to stardom!

We are also happy to report that we’ve made our decision as to which charity we’re going to be giving to, we think that its an important cause that needs more people to rally behind it (more on this later).

Don’t forget, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t donate now to all the great causes we’ve mentioned below. They are all deserving and could greatly use your help!

Fighting the fight,

FameThrower