Am I hot or not?

For some people perhaps they know - I'm model material or butt ugly. But I think for most of us, we wonder, how good looking / average / ugly am I?

Perhaps more than this, we argue about whether someone else is a 5 or a 10. And our perceptions of beauty are so different that we agree to disagree.

This simple issue - perception of beauty - is behind one of the simplest, most popular web sites ever: amihotornot.com - now hotornot.com.



Two guys, James Hong and college roommate Jim Young started the site after having exactly one of these debates. During the dot com explosion, October 2000, the site was born. Within a few months, there were articles about HOTorNOT in a bunch of newspapers and magazines like Salon.com, BusinessWeek, Playboy, and Slashdot. See the extract from the People magazine below.



Now, over 4 years on the site has had over 2 billion votes made.

Of course it has its faults - I have posted my pic and the distribution of votes is far from normal - I swear I think some guy has repeatedly given me a 1 out of 10. Who knows why? I've got some 9s and 10s too.

But at the very least, its a good way to test which photo is best ;)