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Safe dating site TrueDater has launched a site for bookmarking people across multiple social networks. I’ve been critical of TrueDater in the past. I’m not convinced the service has the audience or features to be considered useful. I think something along the lines of member whitelists are where the industry needs to be heading.
Freckl.com is the first ever “social bookmarking� site for people! Just like you can save links to your “Favorite� web sites in your web browser, on freckL.com you can save links to profiles of people on your favorite dating or social networking sites. Even better, you can share your favorites with others! Also, you can “tag� your favorites with keywords and use these keywords to find new people to meet.
Social bookmarking has been done before in the dating space, but there was never any long-term value to the service, whereas aggregating Favorites across several social networking sites is a smart step in a new longer-term direction for TrueDater.
The home page is split into the “hottest” males and females. Clicking a link brings up a page for each person, with tags, some metadata and their entire profile in a window. In this context, in-lining entire Myspace pages is wrong, plain and simple. I predict Myspace and Yahoo will shut them down or make them remove the functionality in short order.
I can see pulling the person’s photo, but what is the value of displaying the entire page?
Profile data as part of an RSS feed- we’ve talked about this many times before, and this is a perfect example of a third-party site that could drive traffic to dating sites.
Myspace has made voyeurism and profile hopping simple. Does Freckl think they can do it better?
One you bookmark someone, you have to enter in the screen name gender orientation age and tags. Everything but the user-created tags can be pulled directly from the profile. Why make people type in the information? Lazy, they could have avoided the wrath of Myspace if they had taken a few more days to tweak the code.
Voting for the profile is limited to hot, scam or cheesy. Most Myspace profiles are cheesy or scams, not much value to this rating system. There are thumbs up or down buttons as well.
The real value of Freckl is what you can do with each person’s meta-list of people. Advertisers and live events and group buying comes to mind initially. Anything is better than useless, unfocused Google Ads.
In it’s current form, the site is really a directory for soft porn, Hot-or-Not meets social networking. There is no focus on the value to people otherwise. This may change over time, but until they make it worth the while, it’s easier and more fun browse sites directly.
Technorati Tags: social networking, freckl, social bookmarking
Category:Dating Sites, Innovation, Social Networking Tags: Dating-Site - Innovation - social-networkingBlog reactions
2 responses so far ↓
1
Andy Arnott (Check me out!)
// Jul 8, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I took a look at the site, and I hate to say it, but I’m not very impressed. (I hate naysayers like me, so call it constructive criticism)
Point #1: Framing other sites can and will get you into legal troubles (that’s why we didn’t consider that), not to mention it looks messy and is really pointless unless you are desperately trying to get more page views. (Launch them in a new window). I do like the name Freckl though, very creative!
Point #2 Freckl.com is the first ever “social bookmarking� site for people! - Not true! We may not have called it “Social bookmarking”, and the way we do it is a little different, but we were the first site to allow people to list their usernames on other dating and social networking sites.
Point #3 I really don’t see much functionality!?!? So you bookmark a person, then what!!?!?
Point #4 We are deep in development of V1.0 of Collaboradate.com. Some of the things to look forward to is our seamless browsing of other dating / social networking sites, with the ability to contact users with any type of communication they allow (skype, [yahoo, msn, aol, icq IM], email, phone).. Real tagging (you tag yourself, and other can tag you as well [which you can approve or deny]), easy searching, international support, all kinds of bookmarking. Many other great features which we are keeping under wraps for now.
As usual… great info Dave!
2
Makrus (Check me out!)
// Jul 9, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Framing other sites is a voilation of the adsense TOS.
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