Tom
18th Feb 2007, 07:14 am
There was a Radio 5 'Brief Lives' biography on 18.2.2007 of the founder of the Gaydar website and there is a report of his death on Digitalspy http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/radio/a42670/gaydar-founder-frisch-dies.html:
'Police found South African-born Frisch, 38, outside his Wandsworth home in south-west London, at 1pm on Saturday. It appeared he had fallen from an eighth floor balcony and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police are treating his death as "unexplained", pending a post-mortem and CID investigation.'
I had not heard of it before, but Radio 5 said it is a very successful web business, fully linked with and supported by the gay community and integrated with a radio station and and a travel company. Gaydar is of course the famous ability of gay people to detect whether other people are gay (gay+radar) - and it provided a wonderful url for a website: short, memorable, easy-to-spell, easy-to-say, everything a good website architect could want in a domain name.
Gaydar is not a porn site but it always worth remembering that the sex industry is said to be one of the great driving forces in web development and ecommerce - and that people who write nice books on web design and development don't like to talk about it.
The developers of the Gaydar website may have seen, or heard about, a few porn sites in their time and have made good use of one idea: they offer a Site Tour. On big websites it is often hard to discover 'what they do' and this idea might have a future outside the sex industry.
A puzzling feature of the Gaydar website is that they seem to have links to the same content under two similar domain names: http://rainbownetwork.com/ and http://www.rainbownetwork.com/. The latter is described on the link as Gaydartravel.com but does not seem to have much about travel and does not allow hotel bookings. Any ideas why this should be? My guess is that Gary Frisch was a good, and lucky, technical developer - but not quite so good as a website architect.
'Police found South African-born Frisch, 38, outside his Wandsworth home in south-west London, at 1pm on Saturday. It appeared he had fallen from an eighth floor balcony and was pronounced dead at the scene. Police are treating his death as "unexplained", pending a post-mortem and CID investigation.'
I had not heard of it before, but Radio 5 said it is a very successful web business, fully linked with and supported by the gay community and integrated with a radio station and and a travel company. Gaydar is of course the famous ability of gay people to detect whether other people are gay (gay+radar) - and it provided a wonderful url for a website: short, memorable, easy-to-spell, easy-to-say, everything a good website architect could want in a domain name.
Gaydar is not a porn site but it always worth remembering that the sex industry is said to be one of the great driving forces in web development and ecommerce - and that people who write nice books on web design and development don't like to talk about it.
The developers of the Gaydar website may have seen, or heard about, a few porn sites in their time and have made good use of one idea: they offer a Site Tour. On big websites it is often hard to discover 'what they do' and this idea might have a future outside the sex industry.
A puzzling feature of the Gaydar website is that they seem to have links to the same content under two similar domain names: http://rainbownetwork.com/ and http://www.rainbownetwork.com/. The latter is described on the link as Gaydartravel.com but does not seem to have much about travel and does not allow hotel bookings. Any ideas why this should be? My guess is that Gary Frisch was a good, and lucky, technical developer - but not quite so good as a website architect.