I came across Scottsdale, Arizona based Solomodels today. I’m writing about it because it has pictures of really attractive women on the site it is a textbook example of Ajax, search and social networking. It caters to models, photographers and agents.
Founder Hoss Etemad wrote to me to describe the service, and I must say I found it immediately intriguing. Participants can create profiles, upload photos, add members as friends, chat, etc. The search functionality is great – type in just about any physical attribute, from bust size to eye color, and get your model match.
They offer a seven day free trial for people interested in trying out the service. Solomodels is all business though. The site warns:
Our members are not here for dating.
Contacting our members for anything other than legitimate modeling related work is strictly prohibited and will result in immediate account cancellation. If you are looking for a date, please sign up for a dating site instead.
So don’t even think about it.
What a great site to demonstrate the awesomeness of web 2.0. 
They’ve done an excellent job with the gallery presentations. I concur, quite a demonstrable web2.0 site. And here I was just about to go to bed, gee thanks.
Whoa, for a minute there I thought this was Ben Barren’s blog.
Am I the only one finding the page unnavigable?
After seeing five! different navigation bars and blinking “new!” I’ve left. What a mess.
Where did you find Web 2.0? Flash website, simple models catalog, no new ideas.
Forget web 2.0! Have you seen the photos of the girls on the site??? Who needs web 2.0 when you’ve content like this.
Triple threat; ajax, usability and content. I see this one being winner.
Solomodels does offer a nice presentation (in more ways than one). All I could think about though while reading this post was the movie Zoolander – which gives an inside look at the world of male modeling.
http://en.wikip.../wiki/Zoolander
…and don’t forget those RSS feeds powered by FeedBurner!
http://www.solo...m/rss/index.cfm
All Web 2.0 (W2) sites are not created equal.
The AJAX is the image fetching portion from what I could tell. I saw this site first on Google’s blog a couple of months ago. If you navigate the site, the thumbnails are displayed very quickly. Then as you roll across each image, the full blown image is fetched on the fly.
There’s no prefetching going. As a result, browsing for models page by page are very fast.
I like the fact that they controlled how the large image is displayed so that it does not cause the horizontal scroll bar to appear if it reaches the edge of the screen.
The response to this posting by techcrunch has been truly amazing, We’ve spent the better part of this morning replying to various emails from other technology blog sites and some news organization seeking more information.
Solomodels uses Ajax in quite a few places when it makes sense, such as for quick image previews, the Help section, and quite a bit of Ajax when users are actually logged in. For example, configuring the flash creatives uses Ajax to allow drag/drop/sorting of images to build the flash creatives. The internal chat/IM system is also Ajax based, allowing messenger like features without any activeX or other pluggins, but just Ajax.
Pretty cool, but any website that suddenly blasts music at me without me asking for it gets an immediate thumbs down.
If you must do it, at the very least please slowly fade the music in so I have time to adjust my speakers.
You can imagine my face when quietly browsing the web and a loud commotion brings my girlfriend into the room.
Her: ‘What’cha doing?’
Me: ‘Umm.. er.. researching AJAX stuff’
Her: ‘Oh… reallly? That doesn’t look like research to me!’
DOH!
hehe, yeah, looks like something ben barren would definitely have an opinion on.
talk about sticky apps…
The company did a good job at CES, going around the show and handing out press kits to the different companies.
And, well, they positioned themselves well to Michael.
Haha @ Mark Thomson. An all too familiar story for me also.
I think solomodels does a great job at implementing these technologies into something that isnt so “geeky” or something that has more of a practical output and usage.
It is obvious solomodels is doing something similar to onemodelplace.com (that place is huge) but i’d consider OMP more like the myspace of modelling protfolio providers. They are good but solomodels is better.
That flash portfolio is amazing to use so thumbs up on that one. … but maybe you can fade each music track in for 5 seconds at the start?
JAFWS
(just another flash web site)
I don’t know about web 2.0, but if we are talking about slick AJAX-enabled UIs, I think you should check out
http://www.goowy.com
I was blown away by how clean the design is.
#16, that’s like saying google is just another search engine
JAFWS
(just another flash web site)
Hehe, thats it…
I just wish Tech Crunch would of used my solomodels site (girls) for content
on this story
http://www.LagunaFashion.com
http://www.beauty333.com
http://www.beauty333.com