Yet another chapter has been added to the neverending story of dotted startup names:
Fo.rtuito.us not only jump into that market (which can be quite profitable, if you’ve decided to call your startup del.icio.us), but try to munch off the cake that’s social networking as well. Their idea? Well, it’s summed up nicely on their frontpage:
What would happen if we no longer used things like looks, age, sex and nationality to decide if we would try and become freinds [sic] with a person?
This sounds like a nice concept, and I’m pretty sure it will work greatly for the one second until you’re prompted to upload your picture when signing up. Because after you’re signed up, some stranger’s picture is displayed to you, and you can decide to contact them or not. So in reality, instead of abolishing these boundaries cited above, they’re reinforcing people’s preconceptions by giving them a picture and nothing else.
Michael Arrington of course wrote about them first and even provided them with a quote for their frontpage (“fo.rtuito.us is serendipity on steroids”), but didn’t notice the irony behind the concept.
So I guess Fo.rtuito.us is not much more than a “hot-or-not” service, thinly veiled as a social networking service.