from the OkCupid faq:<p>Are you interested in a “strategic partnership”?<p><pre><code> Not if it involves us paying you.
</code></pre>
I have an idea. May I tell you?<p><pre><code> Sure! But you won’t get anything for it, and we’ll keep it
to ourselves, and we’ll use it to make millions. Possibly.
You might want to keep your ideas to yourself.
</code></pre>
(source <a href="http://www.okcupid.com/faq" rel="nofollow">http://www.okcupid.com/faq</a> > Business)
Wow, they stole a whole idea? Somebody call the cops, I can't believe it!<p>Seriously though, if you think your idea is that great, you should write it on a little note and keep it in a shoebox. Then, within days, weeks but at most years you'll find that somehow someone seems to have had magical access to your shoebox and managed to read right through the cardboard.<p>How did they do that?<p>Don't tell anybody your ideas if they're that good, they'll run with it and might even do a better job than you yourself ever will...<p>Especially somebody that is in a position to implement your idea overnight and make a bundle while doing it, that's tying the proverbial cat to the bacon and expecting the bacon to be there in the morning.<p>Nice story about ideas and how to make money of them:<p>Two gentlemen showed up at a notary public to see if he had a solution to their dilemma.<p>The first was a well known businessman, the second an inventor.<p>The businessman made matchboxes and the inventor had come up with an idea to save money on the production of the boxes, but realized that if he gave his idea the businessman would implement it and not pay him.<p>So he named his price, asked the businessman to deposit the money with the notary, and if the idea upon disclosure would be implemented within 5 years the money would flow to the inventor, otherwise it would go back to the businessman.<p>The idea was simple as can be: "only put the 'rubbing surface' on one side of the box", instant savings.<p>The businessman immediately realized the potential and the money was released, both parties happy.<p>So if you wish to 'sell your idea' use some kind of escrow to make sure that you get what's due to you, and if you don't, don't bitch.
FWIW, the idea is obvious, and I actually made a journal post on okcupid about doing this on my own profile (uploading a bunch of pictures to hotornot.com, taking the highest rated couple to post onto okcupid) in January of 2008.
I think every site out there needs to fully expect to have their ideas stolen and operate as if their competitors could duplicate their functionality tomorrow. If you have built anything worthwhile, it's going to happen.<p>A key to success is staying competitive and always improving on what's available to your marketplace.
Given their January study in profile pictures [1] I'm surprised they require people to pick a picture manually in hot-or-not fashion.<p>A better idea would be to implement this feature as an A/B test Automatically rotate through the pictures and see which picture gets the most responses.<p>They have the data to do this and it would avoid any idea origination conflicts (with FriendlyRank anyway).<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths-of-profile-pictures/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/2010/01/20/the-4-big-myths...</a>
Frankly it's an obvious idea. I storyboarded up a dating site concept last year and came up with the same thing.<p>People already use sites like hotornot for precisely this purpose. I'd be surprised if there aren't already half a dozen sites out there doing exactly this. Googling for "rate my photo" brings up an easy handful, I'm sure more than a few have a rank your photos functionality.
So let me get this straight, they went to a business with the potential, brains, and resources to steal their idea, had virtually no barriers to entry, and told them about it freely?<p>There are several things you can cry poor sportsmanship for in business, this would not be one of them.<p>That said, I can't tell if they're truly bitter or just running with an opportunity for a marketing ploy that presented itself.
Hmm. Reading the descriptions of FriendlyRank + MyBestFace, I'm not sure they are in any way the same thing. OKCupid's product uses their own data to evaluate profile pictures. FriendlyRank explicitly asks users (which users? does FriendlyRank have a user base?) to rate photos.<p>This is a big difference. If the purpose is to rate photos based on their effectiveness in a social networking environment, I'd much rather use implicit social network data rather than deal with low response rate & terribly biased data from explicit surveys.<p>In short, OKCupid seems to have a much better source of data to achieve the goals common to both FriendlyRank + MyBestFace.
I believe the word they're looking for is called "competing" not stealing.<p>They had nothing <i>to license</i>. They didn't have rights on any particular technology, and they certainly didn't have rights to all "ways to pick a good profile picture."<p>Even if this site <i>does</i> file a patent and get it, they likely STILL won't have the resources to then extract a licensing fee from anyone, as it isn't even clearly the same idea.
Someone should post a similar letter, but swap out OkCupid & FriendlyRank with Microsoft & Apple. Or... gosh... so many examples, so little time to list them all...