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Went Hot: November 1, 2007 - 1:28 pm
Posted By: swags2804 302 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginepeople.com)
Category: Social Media
18 Comments
Went Hot: November 1, 2007 - 1:28 pm
Posted By: swags2804 302 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginepeople.com)
Category: Social Media
18 Comments
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Comments
Great idea! I've often wanted to test this myself, but never bothered. I'd love to see it expanded to forums and other places. My guess is that people treat those with good looking avatars a lot nicer and are more helpful to them.
Good post. It's one of those things that you just assume to be true from years of observation but it's nice to see it (kind of) tested.
Maybe Jeff's next experiment could measure the reaction of people who find out that the stunning girl whose posts they've been Sphinning turns out to be a 23 stone trucker named Dave with a penchant for link baiting.
Maybe its an instinctive male reflex but I almost always click through on a cute/gorgeous female avatar on ANY social website, not just SU. :)
The opposite could be true though, I think hunky male avatars would do great on many entertainment social networks where a lot more women are users..
There definitely isn't enough research on the impact of avatars vaguely resembling blue paw prints on which someone has drawn a crude face and hands.
Unless you count that flawed Jakob Neilsen study from last year.
I wonder about the effect of using a celebrity like Mick Jagger as your avatar.
@ Jill - thanks! I agree completely. Now that the basics show promise, we'd like to expand it and look at other social media, and other impacts (not just mutual friending).
@ Baiduyou - we considered using a cartoon character in the experiment too ... but it could then easily have ballooned in complexity.
@ DoshDosh - absolutely it would be situational!
@ crimsongirl - that would be interesting too. Perhaps next study. In the mean time, your avatar worked just fine, right Doshdosh?
Thanks for the reference Jeff, I'm fascinated by this stuff.
Even though I know that 9/10 are going to be fake I will still vote them if they are nice looking pictures of girls, the obvious fake ones I don't bother with (you know in supermodel type in a bkini) but if I think there is a chance that they are real even a small one they will get my vote, so the key is to get a nice looking normal girl photo with a realistic name:
http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/deezin
http://sphinn.com/user/view/profile/semfan
These two have pulled it off and they always get my votes, weather they are real girls or not I am not too sure. I am an idiot I know.
@ crimsongirl - Only time will tell. After all, "time is on my side". ;)
I never thought that anyone would actually test it out. Its great. I still have not seen anyone change their avatar here on sphinn yet. After a post like this I thought that everyone will go through the transition.
@Eavesy: Thanks for sharing. I thinks that's valuable additional information to consider when creating avatars for social sites. For those of us here on Sphinn, getting face to face at conferences, it may best to use "real" images.
Have you every NOT let the really pretty girl merge in front of your car in traffic?
Very cool analysis. I found that my female avatar on Digg (pre-the new version) didn't fare well for me so now I'm a kiss emoticon. I noticed that a fake sexy girl, however, had a lot of friends quickly. It's a man's dream that those women are really who they are. As baiduyou said, a lot of them aren't :)
I actually found the "interesting findings" more interesting than the main premise, which I felt was a giveaway. It's the "Gamestop Girl" effect, for the most part (which, when I was a kid, was the Comic Store Girl effect, but I digress.)
Finding that women are less likely to friend strangers than men, and that such a high percentage of people would friend you back even without a prior relationship are both things I sorta suspected, but it's really nice to get confirmation with some data to back it up.
I haven't read completely through this article yet but ... these avatars seem quite familiar to me. :) Three of them popped up from the same general location with similiar text, as you described and friended me out of the blue. Two or three (?) weeks back. I thought this was quite strange and suspected off the bat they might be shills or part of some SEO scheme. I will glance at thei profiles occasionally out of curiousity to see what they were stumbling/marketing ... but they never did anything.
If this isn't you, the someone else is running the same test I suspect. :)
BTW. I don't add anyone as a friend that I'm not going to read thier posts.
Cool experiment, but nothing really shocking here. (I liked the little movie style poster on the page more than the article itself I think) I'm glad that he added that he doesn't advocate false avatars. Being genuine matters more in the long run than sex appeal. (ya I know guys, we are screwed)
:D I definitely will put a hot chick, and cute one and another sexy chick :D take friendster for example, you get tons of traffic! XD definitely a sphunn
I've experienced this in the programming forums first hand (where the forum owners and 'regulars' are male).
It wasn't all about the avatar (on those forums I use a caricature of an animal)! Once I signed off as Laura and three knights in shining armor came to my rescue - one even mentioning how a woman's name in that forum demanded and deserved more attention than a Tom, Dick or Harry's sig.