Ampers & Dot

Today’s a short one, but I wanted to take a moment to honor a great site in history (and apparently present): Hotornot.com

Disclaimer: I haven’t been to hotornot.com since 2001, including to write this post- could someone please go there, find me some funny links, and email them to me.  Thanks.  Ok, let’s get going.

I read this article on Hot or Not’s recent acquisition for $20M the other day and after my initial reaction of “Hot or not is still around!?”, I got to thinking about the site.  For those unfamiliar, HotorNot.com is a site where people post pictures of themselves for others to rate if they are “hot” or… you guessed it, “not”.  It’s an amazingly simple concept, which took the web by storm in its early years.

I remember finding HotorNot.com not long after its creation back around 2000 (oh way back when…) and looking at it between classes at school, with friends, laughing at all the silly people who were insecure enough to need to know if they were indeed as “hot” as they thought.  As you can only imagine, this provided hours of fun…

Well the kicker of all this is that it is delightfully “web 2.0″, as far back as 2000.  That’s right, I’m going to talk seriously about the term web 2.0.  Didn’t see that coming, did you?

The fundamental groundwork for a “web 2.0″ site: user creation and interactivity.  HotorNot: users create pages, viewers vote on them.  HotorNot, which also received HUGE funding and survived the dot-com boom, found the market of profitability in interactivity very early on.  Back then it was strange to have such a large site created entirely by users- this was basically unheard of.  Plus, it was free, pulling in all income from advertising through banners and popups.  Again, a very standard practice today, but HotorNot was way ahead of its time.

The web is moving towards even more interactivity and user creation, which helps me understand how HotorNot can still be kicking funding around eight years later.

So here’s what I want to know: What’s out there now that is ahead of its time?  What sites are out there right now that will survive the next burst? Who will be able to keep a user base, or an operational model, while the others blend together and fade away?  What do you think?

And yes, if I knew the answer to this I’d probably be doing a lot more investing…  In the meantime I’ll keep watching VCs to see where the money goes- and the trends will reveal themselves.  All we have to do is wait.  And to kill time- I think I’m going to go check out hotornot.com