Pageviews and unique penises

Pud,

What happened to Mobog.com? I loved looking at cameraphone pics while I was on the phone with customers.

Thanks,
Pete
35 years old
Tampa, Florida

Hi Pete,

Thanks for your interest.

For those who don’t know, Mobog.com was a site that I built in 2003 that allowed you to instantly upload pics from your camera phone to the Internet. If you’ve heard of Twitter, it was similar to that, but for pictures instead of text.

The site was always kinda broken because I didn’t spocus on it (one day I’ll post something about “spocus” — speed & focus, the word taught to me by a friend of mine years ago). Nevertheless, at its height there was a new pic posted every second.

But the problem with publishing user generated photos on the Internet, is that it will ultimately devolve into porn unless heavily moderated. Sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Photobucket review every single photo that reaches the sites, and porno pics are removed.

It’s pretty easy to build a system for cheap laborers around the world to review pics and pluck out the dirty ones. But I never got around to it.

And what started out as clean wholesome fun, turned into the world’s largest collection of penis pictures on the Internet. Every couple of minutes, someone new would send in a picture of their penis.

And it was accelerating.

I became less concerned with the number of “unique users” visiting my site, and became worried about the number of unique penises. With about 1,000 unique penises per day, doubling every 2 weeks, I calculated that by the year 2009, one-in-three men in the United States will have uploaded a picture of his penis to my website.

🙂

Anyway, I shut it down. One of the more unfortunate parts is that — as I was in the process of shutting it down — I was unexpectedly informed that FHM magazine chose Mobog as #1 in their list of “50 most addictive websites.” (click the picture below)

Ah well.