2015, i’d just been slapped by the social network1. i had some experience with websites so i wondered if i could remake a copy of facemash but including boys too. so i called my best friend and convinced him to make our own version : ClickMe.
we had no campus directory to break into. what we had was facebook, and a small campus. so we downloaded the photos by hand. one by one.
the idea was simple:
- a cursor-pointer as a logo
- two colors : red for girls and blue for boys
- no authentication
- basic HTML/CSS/JS + PHP/SQL stack
these pictures are from the prototype phase when we worked mainly on the matching algorithm.
the algorithm
we initially tried the elo chess algorithm (like in the movie) but it was too complicated to implement (the match result part based on how much its “surprising”).
so instead, we went with a simple tier list system with 4-5 tiers : only same tier’s people were compared.
the website made everyone (not really) laugh for a few weeks then we shut it down. some students started to complain and honestly we knew it wasn’t really ethical.
anyway, it was very fun.
Footnotes
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this movie completely changed my life (like many of us i think). ↩