Side Projects

The stuff I make because I can’t not.

I’ve always loved doing creative side projects outside of work. No clients, no briefs, no rules - just making stuff for fun.

Eelslap

Slap me in the face with an eel, because why not?

For an old project, we rented a big high-speed camera and filmed some bonus footage for a promo. I somehow agreed to get slapped by an eel on camera. One evening I turned the small clip into a little web toy, put it on a hidden link, and sent it to some friends just for fun.

Months later, I noticed my server was melting: the link had spread on its own and become a hit in Japan, without me having any idea. So I bought eelslap.com, gave the toy a proper home, and 50 million visitors later it’s still going. The internet is a crazy place, kids.

Webby & Lovie winner. Featured in Fox News, BuzzFeed, BoingBoing, and Cosmopolitan.

Filter Fakers

Automatically catching liars on Instagram.

Remember when Instagram was new? It was all about filters, so much that it became a flex to NOT use any. That’s when the hashtag #nofilter started trending, and we thought it would be fun to check how many of those #nofilter posts actually did use a filter.

So we built Filter Fakers, a site that automatically caught them and named the exact filter they’d used. We made it as a little joke; the people we caught did not take it as one. The angry messages were almost better than the press.

Webby & Lovie winner. Featured in Gizmodo, BuzzFeed, The Verge, ABC, NBC, Mashable, and Comedy Central.

Worldcam

See any place on earth through Instagram.

For years Instagram had no way to see photos from a specific place, and we really wanted one. So we built it ourselves: a search engine that showed you the latest photos from any location on the planet. Disneyland, the Taj Mahal, your local pizzeria, live. Then Instagram built the same feature into the app, and Worldcam wasn’t needed anymore. Still pretty happy we got there three years before they did.

Featured in Gizmodo, Fast Company, The Verge, and CNBC.

Is It Old?

Save yourself the embarrassment of posting old links.

You find a great link, you share it, and someone immediately tells you “dude, everyone’s seen that.” Is It Old? existed to save you from that moment. Paste a link and it told you when it was first tweeted, how many people had tweeted it since, and then gave you the verdict straight: share it, or ABORT. It did a few million visits in its first year before Twitter changed its API rules and killed it. So everyone is now back to posting old links and looking like fools, and there’s nothing I can do for them.

Featured in Mashable, The Next Web, Huffington Post, Adweek, Lifehacker, and CNET.

The Latest

The ten best links on the internet right now.

Keeping up with the internet is a full-time job, and most of us already have one. The Latest watched the people who always tweet the best links first, in tech, advertising, and design, and compiled what they shared into a constantly updated top ten. One page, refreshed in real time. A cure for digital FOMO that we mostly built for ourselves. Sadly, also killed by Twitter’s new API rules.

Lovie & W3 winner. Featured in Fast Company, Wired, PSFK, The Next Web, and AdAge.

More in the works. Less weird, allegedly.

Contact

Say hello.

Got a dumb idea that won’t leave you alone? Or an idea for a collab? Let me know.

per [at] perstenius dot com LinkedIn Instagram