Collaborative editing is making it’s way into online dating profiles. Recently Match launched a Testimonial feature and this morning I discovered OKCupid enables friends to edit your profile.
Another weirdo toy by us. With the new WikiProfile feature, you can let anyone you trust propose edits to your profile. Is that a twisted thing for a dating site to do? (You can let us know.) If you want to try it, enter e-mail addresses, and we’ll let your friends make private changes. They don’t have to be members of OkC and they don’t have to join. It’s so easy. Your friends can write as you, and when they save their work, you’ll get the option to approve, reject, etc.
This is cool. I sent myself an invitation and immediately got an email displaying my profile text. What’s even better is that the person you invite to edit your profile does not have to be an OKCupid member to revise your text. Kudos for not forcing them to signup. The feature works just like a usual wiki. Every single field of profile text is displayed inside a large textarea box. When you’re doing editing, add your name, how you know the person, a verification code and submit changes. Simple.
As the editor, I could then see the edits that were made to my profile. OKCupid did a nice job with making the edits easy to see and understand.
One problem I had was that when I logged back into my profile, there was not indication someone had edited my text. This needs to be fixed asap. Send an email or at least put an indicator on my home page.
When I visited my profile page, edits were clearly displayed and the approval or rejection process was smooth, I like how they did this, very clean.
I sent out several emails to friends to write me a Match recommendation, which was not well-received, people ended up emailing me their text, circumventing the Match process, but then I had to ask them to go back through the Match system because I can’t add the recommendations myself.
I’ll send out requests to a group of friends and see how many take me up on on the task to improve my OKCupid profile. I would post a link here for readers to try editing my profile, but it looks like I need to provide email addresses. Why can’t I post a link if I choose to?
It would be interesting to have people edit your profile post-date. How cool would that be? You could learn a lot about yourself and the person you went out with.
I stumbled across another new feature while checking out the OKCupid homepage.
Hey, good looking! OkCupid profiles now have a star-rating system. You can easily keep track of how attractive and cool you find everyone. Why? In the coming days we’ll be adding a bunch of features that use your ratings: a page to review people you rated in the past, a matching system using the star data, etc. Your votes are generally private, although we may do something…err…mutual with 5-star ratings. Notes you attach are so you can remember why you were loving on someone or whatever. They’re private, unless you choose to share notes with a friend. All coming soon, so start rating.
Another great set of ideas. Once you have ratings and notes in place, there are all sorts of interesting things you can do. This is almost more exciting than Steve’s MacWorld address yesterday (where’s the new MacBook Pro!).
Nice job Sam and the team. Overall, a well-executed set of feature upgrades from OKCupid.
