Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don't miss our Startups directory, useful to anyone running dating or social networking sites. Subscribe to the RSS feed (you can subscribe via email as well). Your comments and suggestions for stories are welcomed.
We offer consulting services to dating sites and social networks as well.
We’re getting past the time when people belong to a single dating/socialnetworking/affinity site. I am not only a single guy, and that’s not how I’m introduced to new company, so why should I only have a profile on a date-warehouse, when I want to be on an exercise dating site, a site for snowboarders, a Mac community then then don’t forget I want to hook up with my old friends on Facebook. What makes me me is my connection with each of these communities.
Tags are a big step in the right direction, but I want more. This brings us back to open user-controlled profiles, which I hope someone talks about at iDate.
I have something like 47 profiles at the moment. I’ve already un-subbed from about 25 dating sites, the rest are banking, social networking, publishing network preferences and so on.
Recently I attempted editing a few fields on each profile and it took over two hours because I had changed email addresses over time, forgotten passwords and otherwise had to battle with sites to unlock my profile to make changes. A real pain to say the least.
My days of daily participation in 15 or so dating sites are nearing the end. I’ve done the big-box sites, I’ve done the niche sites, I’ve done golfing sites (and I don’t even golf) and many others for a long time now.
Just let me subscribe to my matches with my RSS news reader because your design isn’t what I want, your features don’t address my specific needs and from now on you’re going to have to try a lot harder to win my business because you don’t seem to understand how to design a service for real people with real lives, expectations and time constraints. Tone down ego, get off of pedestal,
get out in the streets, talk to people, take 1/4 of your marketing budget and move it over to R&D, and go out and make a few mistakes, I promise it won’t hurt much and you’ll learn a lot more than you can imagine.
Oh, and before I forget, kudos to Match for doing a decent job copying over your Match photos and info to Chemistry.com.
[tags: open+profiles]
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
When we in the dating business design sites, we don’t design for your specs;-) Rather, we design for the “typical” single consumer who does not have your complex needs!
The next phase of the web is about taking back control of your information. Why should I have my personal info scattered all over the net? It’s difficult to track, maintain and protect.
I would pay more money if I could maintain all my profiles from a central location.
The argument get’s stronger when you broaden the definition of profile to include banking, medical, social and other silos which have multiple copies of my information.
I think I’m the other guy who maintains accounts at every site on the planet! I’m almost done with the next version of AppleDates and I’m adding RSS on two levels. One, since we’re events-based, I have feeds for New York City events. Second, you can build a feed based on your “seeking” criteria. I’m building some advanced features so your RSS feed will not flood over with bad matches. Another feature is that you can get a google-like-tag that you can post on your website that creates a panel on your site with your profile and first date ideas.
I do have a comment on centralization. It would take me about 15 minutes to make a system to post my profiles on Match.com (or grab them from Match)—you should seem my craigslist poster—but unless Match is going to let people use third-party posting sites, and I tend to think they are not “open,” I think centralization is a no go.