OkTrends

One of our most popular posts ever was about profile pictures and what works and what doesn’t. For example, we examined why two very similar-seeming pictures of two very similar-seeming people often get very different amounts of attention:

As a follow-up, we’ve made something that can generate a personalized analysis of anyone’s profile pictures, something that can make a “blog post” just for you. It’s designed to help you choose your best pictures to put on your OkCupid profile, Facebook page, or whatever—sort of a more scientific (and more useful) Hot-Or-Not. We’re calling it MyBestFace.

MyBestFace is very simple: you upload photos of yourself; you contribute a few votes to the system; and after enough other people have done likewise, you get a report about your photos. The report is detailed and very awesome. I’ll show you mine.

It starts, naturally, by telling me which of my pictures was the most popular:

It also tells me what kind of people liked my photos: overachievers, deviants, jocks, whatever:

And I get a nifty map showing where all the people who voted for me are. It looks like I have heretofore undiscovered fan in the Philippines. Sweet.

My favorite part of the report is the end, where it shows the other photos mine were matched up against and exactly which people chose my picture as the best.

If you’d like to examine a complete example report, one of our beta-testers has generously agreed to let you guys browse hers. You can do so here.

MyBestFace is something we thought would be fun. We’re not thinking it’s gonna be huge or anything, but we hope it might be useful to anyone looking to do for themselves what we do here on the blog: figure stuff out. Upload a couple pics and play around with it. And let us know if anything seems busted! Besides your face! Burn!!!