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!

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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**

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