Famousr – It’s Not a Site; It’s a Feature

I'm starting to get the feeling that many of these new "sites" are just ideas to add to existing community sites like MySpace, Friendster, and the like. A perfect example of this new trend of building a feature you hope will be purchased is the new site Famousr, a bare-bones site that is essentially three little games. The first shows two celebrity photos and asks you to choose which is more famous. You get points for each correct answer, as well as tracking for your best streak of right answers. The second tab allows you to put in the names of two celebrities and find out which one is considered more famous, and the third tab shows pictures of character actors and asks "Who's That Guy?" inviting you to guess which of four movies is the actor's most famous.

In terms of Web 2.0, Famousr has the name right (see the missing "e" at the end there?), the color scheme almost right (the spring green is there), has a blog, and lists itself as "beta," all hallmarks of a Web 2.0 company. Famousr also uses an algorithm (the Google buzzword) to determine a person's fame quotient by monitoring buzz, news coverage, and the like, but the problem is that this still isn't much of anything. It's fun for a few minutes, but it isn't a site you'll feel a need to keep coming back to again and again. You could roll it into a community site as a cute little widget users could add to profile pages, or on one of the new social polling sites as an added feature, but other than that, it's a very simple app that doesn't do much, and above all, doesn't look like much. Even the logo image (if you can call it that) is merely text, and not even in an interesting font.

Sites like this one and another one that Phil reviewed recently, Agester, make it seem like folks are buying Web 2.0 lottery tickets: the odds are against them for any kind of success, but there's always a shot you can get rich quick if someone will buy you.