Our Inspiration

Believe it or not, Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook provided the initial inspiration for OShorty. Before Facebook, he first created Facemash. Facemash was a site created by Zuckerberg, one drunken night in college while angry at the girl he was dating, to rank the “Hot” Women at Harvard, where he attended. Using a sophisticated algorithm created by him and his friends and the pictures from Harvard’s Facebooks, the Facemash website presented users with pairs of women attending Harvard and asked them to rank who was ‘hotter.’ Though controversial and shut down after a few days, the site was hugely popular and an overnight success. After just a few hours of Facemash’s launch, over 22,000 votes were cast by male and female students alike, creating quite a stir on the Harvard Campus and the traffic was so intense it caused Harvard’s servers to crash. The Harvard student’s ( male and female ) fascination with judging female students for the hottest left quite an impression. The Facemash website itself might seem insignificant, just a prank by Zuckerberg. Still it provided a significant part of the inspiration to start a new social media platform and App called OShorty. In addition to the Facemash story, one woman, in particular, played a significant part in the inspiration to start OShorty. This inspiration stemmed from a marketing campaign of an Internet company called GoDaddy. The marketing campaign featured a beautiful woman named Danika Patrick, an American race car driver and the first woman to win an IndyCar championship event. Marketing featuring Danika propelled Godaddy to extraordinary levels of success. Women such as Danika Patrick exemplify a concept that can make OShorty something different and outstanding beyond the ordinary if replicated worldwide in the medium of social media. Adding below skin-deep to the equation to create a social media channel and App that offers a unique, entertaining, and fun experience to its users and a social media platform with untold marketing opportunities.