I recently became single and being a startup geek decided to try my luck in OkCupid's waters. Unsure of which profile pictures to use I decided to try an A/B test of sorts.
This is the plan I today hatched for my evening of hacking:
First.. Pull together potential candidates for the profile photo.
Then write scripts to: 1 - Upload them all to a photo hosting site. 2 - Register a 'throwaway' email for each photo. 3 - Create some MechTurk HITs to do the registration for on HotOrNot. One account per photo so that my testing happens in parallel. 4 - Once every few days run MechTurk HITs to harvest the # votes and avg rating for each photo, shove them into a spreadsheet.
It sounded like great fun until my RSS bleeps and I see OkCupid has added a new killer feature: http://www.okcupid.com/mybestface
So.. cheers to OkCupid for saving me a night of coding (and dramatically improving on my idea besides)