About FTJ

What is this?
This is currently the official blog for FaceTheJury.com (FTJ). It is used as a place to inform members on updates as well as gather feedback on proposed future updates to the site.

How did it start?
FTJ was started in November 2000 in an apartment in Marina del Rey California and for the first 6 months run off of a basic Dell desktop computer.  The initial concept was to put together a site where people could upload photos of themselves and have anonymous Internet surfers rate the photo, thus giving the members an honest opinion of their attractiveness.  Little did we know it would start a “rating site” phenomenon.

Then what happened?
Since then, FTJ has evolved into much more than a rating site.  It could be said FTJ was one of the first social networking sites, and at the height of its popularity was one of the top 800 most highly trafficked sites on the Internet with over 6 million page views per day.

What is it now?
Recently, traffic has slowed some, with people flocking to more popular sites run by large corporations, but we have chosen (not that we had much of a choice) to stay small by all standards.  FTJ has never at any time been run by more than 2 people and uses only 3 servers.

Where is it going?
Without 100 servers and 1000s of employees to worry about, I’ll be able to concentrate more on the members of the FTJ community and cater to their needs.  The direction I see FTJ moving in for the future is a completely member driven community where I simply act, or react (within reason of course) to the demands of the member base.

This blog is the first step toward moving in that direction.