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Social dating site Engage has emerged from it’s two-year beta. As part of the launch program, I received an exclusive preview of the new site from Suneet Wadhwa, the founder of Engage. Disclaimer: I have worked with Engage in the past.

The Engage social dating focus is nothing short of a completely disruptive approach to online dating. I’ve been trying to get dating sites to add social features for years and it’s great to see Engage take the ball and run with it.

Many dating sites are working hard to increase interactivity between members and harness the power of the crowd; I predict that many dating sites will have at least some social features in the next year or two. It’s not going to be the larger players for the most part, as they are too focused on advertising and global expansion to be bothered with actually improving the user experience.

Engage, on the other hand, understands that people want to meet in a natural and fun way. Meeting on most dating sites couldn’t be farther from this concept, with the exception of OKCupid and maybe the forums on PlentyOfFish. When is the last time you told your friends how much fun it is to be on your dating site of choice?

While Engage retains it’s focus on the concept of social dating, the site has undergone numerous changes to bring it in line with what it hopes singles are looking for in a new dating site. This evolution has vastly improved the site at the risk of delaying the official launch for too long.

At it’s core, Engage was designed to be fun and entertaining, because people want to meet naturally, not taking myriad tests and jumping through hoops gain access to other singles.

Most dating sites launching these days are a clone of Match.com or a stock deployment of a dating script. Engage looks and functions differently than any dating site I’ve ever used. They have packed an incredible amount of social features into the new site. The site is highly transactional, combining dating and social networking, the true essence of social dating.

The only question is, do people want to match and be matched online by their peers and can Engage grow the site large enough to be useful? It costs a lot of money to retain top talent, technical infrastructure and fuel marketing campaigns. Chemistry.com is spending over $10 million a year with around 1/2 million members, and that includes the cherry-picking of members from sister site Match.com. This makes the success of sites like SinglesNet and PlentyOfFish all the more incredible when you consider their humble beginnings.

To kickoff the new site, Engage worked with Adaptive Path to build a mental model of the how people use dating sites. On paper the model is 17 feet long. Compare that to the dating applications on Facebook, which were launched in a matter of weeks for the most part. Engage is clearly empire building, as opposed to experimenting with social media.

At the core, Engage has tried to be different from all other dating sites from the start. Initially, profiles were different for men and for women, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. The community aspect of the site was a first as well – encouraging people to be matchmakers as well as members had not been tried on a large scale until then.

In short, Engage is a bit like HotOrNot for grownups, but the site does so much more, it’s a bit daunting to try and explain here. Suneet used the phrase structured voyeurism to describe online dating, which is what I’ve been calling dating sites and social networks for years. Clicking the rating and matching buttons is addictive, at least for a while. Then you start to realize that you are just clicking away with little regard for the quality of the matches. Engage definitely needs to tie in a reputation system with the service. Without it, people will click anything to get more and more points.

The new Engage improves upon the matchmaker theme, adding quite a bit of transparency via new features that make it easy to recommend people to your friends and even people you don’t know.

Interested online dating industry information from Suneet:

• 60% of all men never receive email.
• 29% women don’t either.
• Less people, more transactions/conversations.
• Bilaterial communication between aggressive men and beautify women.
• Most people enjoy a 90% rejection rate.

Engage has gone to great lengths to unleash the connector in each of us by combining dating and social aspect, i.e. social dating. While this is certainly not a new idea, the way that Engage has implemented it certainly is.

What Engage has done is to unleash the viral nature of social networks on it’s own destination website. As with social networks, you can import your address book. If you see someone you think would be a good match for a friend, Engage will contact them if they are a member or not. Engage is relying on this novel feature to draw more people into the system.

I’ve never seen a dating site where you upload your address book. I have over 900 people in mine, and the idea that I would go through my address book and identify all the single people is daunting. But if the service does what it’s supposed to and the people are high-quality enough to warrant me inviting in a few single friends, that’s certainly changing the game of social invites along the lines of Match letting you start a profile for a friend.

Engage says 262,000 unique visitors used its service last month, after two years in beta. As a comparison, sites like Zoosk and Are You Interested have 200-400k visitors after only a few months in service. Such is the strength of free marketing on social networks.

The problem is that most social networking traffic going to dating sites is low-quality for the most part. The question becomes, do you fill your site with lots of casual daters or pay dearly for fewer quality leads?

Let’s take a look at the new features at Engage. This is by no means a comprehensive list, there is simply too much stuff to cover here, you have to go experience the site to get the full picture of what Engage is trying to do in the name of social dating.

When you log in you see Fresh Faces. Fresh Faces is run by a powerful new matching algorithm and it’s the only place on the site where the computer matches your friends. The rest of the matching features of the site are powered by people.

Suggested For You – this is where your friends and others recommend people for you, or people you have recommended for yourself, show up. Shows votes from others, yes or no.
You can suggest someone from their profile page or email them. You can lock out people from seeing your matching page. The other person never sees your Chit Chat about them.

I love the “tag” suggestions. LikeMatchWords but better.
Comments cannot be deleted, which may end up being an issue, but is easy to fix later on.

Suggestions for Friends - These are people who have suggested people you know.
Every transaction you make shows up in related people’s feeds. This configurable “lifestream” lets you control how much of your actions are displayed publically. Some people will find the incredible amount of transparency to be too much. Time will tell how people react to letting it all hang out there.

My primary concern about privacy and transparency on the site is that people who are being talked about are not able to participate in the conversation. Engage likens this to talking to your friends about someone you see across the bar. They can’t hear what you’re saying and are not privy to your interest until you introduce yourself, or are introduced.

Case in point, Mark Brooks at Online Personals Watch connected with me on Engage. Now I would expect good recommendations from Mark, but he he could also choose to tell everyone what a womanizing pervert I am, and I’d be none the wiser. I see this as a big problem.

Your actions on the site are rewarded with points:

5 points for voting
10 points for a comment
100 for a recommendation
250 for an introduction

The points systems is a bit old school, I like the idea of levels better, where you don’t know when you’ll move to the next level. Levels = reputation, the higher the better. I’d like to see a level for matching people that get married. 1,000,000 points perhaps?

Play Matchmaker: allows users to fix-up friends and acquaintances on the site in a myriad of ways.

Social Feed: lets you know what others in your community are doing – e.g. who are they are interested in on the site, who they’ve introduced / recommended to others and how recent dates have gone.

Cast Your Vote: allows Engage users to vote on the best match for random singles on the site, using the power of the community as a catalyst for meeting someone new.

One-click suggestions: allow users to quickly make suggestions for others, or for themselves, based on their initial impressions and gut instinct.

Social Points: these are awarded for any type of matchmaking activity undertaken on the site, i.e. making an introduction for someone in your friend list, or casting your vote on suggested matches. This adds a competitive and entertaining slant on matchmaking activity, to encourage active participation.

Profile page – in general, like Match.

Fixup page – sense of what that person is like and what people are saying about them.

Clicking on friend- shows fresh faces, suggested for them.

About You- your stats.

Leaderboards - points, Power connectors, Movers and shakers, Most popular, etc.

The People page is where you can discuss your matchups privately with friends or publicly. One issue I had with the invitation feature is that it’s a blank box. It needs auto-complete of your Engage friends to be truly useful.

New games such as wingman will rotate on the home page where Cast Your Vote is. You will be able to play Wingman with your friends, getting dumped into conversations with people. There are 6 people involved in a group conversation. I like this idea. No idea if it will work but WooMe does this as well and I love that service.

Various leaderboards let you track your performance on the site. The amount of metrics will keep stats junkies happy.

Cast your Vote: I end up matching people on their horoscopes and who would look good together. Not exactly rocket science but fun none the less.

The social digest is similar to your Facebook Newsfeed, giving you a daily update about how people are matching up you and your friends.

You can lock out people from seeing your matching page. I like this feature. Too many dating sites lack the transparency to be truly effective. Engage just about gets this right.

It’s strange at first to begin an email to someone, only to see the “Add others” option to the email. If I’m going to flirt with a woman in an email, there is no way I’m going to include anyone else in on it.

I don’t like that comments cannot be deleted, and there are some issues with the site being to transparent, in that people can start conversations about you without your knowledge. This creeps me out, perhaps they will change this in the future. A digital version of “are your ears burning?” would be welcome.

The initial learning curve is going to turn some people off, but that is the price Engage will pay for attracting serious daters.

Engage has been around for a few years now. During this time they have landed top-notch talent from Yahoo and Technorati, and Trish McDermott has been with them since the beginning. McDermott was VP of Romance at Match.com, which she joined in 1994.

After several redesigns and little marketing of the site, the time has come for the site to grow through a well-planned marketing campaign based on social dating or be acquired by a site that wants several hundred thousand members and a solid technology platform.

I can imagine a Top 5 dating site acquiring Engage for the right price if Suneet decides he doesn’t want to raise more money to market the site. Or even a large consumer brand for that matter. Engage has done the hard thinking and work and has the patents and intellectual property to show for it.

Will the general public warm up to the concept of social dating in the next 12 months? Maybe all they want to do is be force-fed matches from eHarmony, browse static profiles at Match, SinglesNet and the rest of them. Or maybe people will finally latch onto the idea that having thousand of people helping you find your match can be a lot more effective than any personality test. Nobody knows at this point, but if we look at the success of social networks, it’s clear that people want to communicate with each other, and that dating doesn’t have to be limited to browsing an online catalog.

VentureBeat questions the effectiveness of the Engage approach. I recommend you read their review.

Recently I interviewed Suneet and Trish McDermott of Engage on Cupidcast.tv. We spent an hour talking about Engage, the current state of the online dating industry and much more. Check out the podcast for much more information about Engage.com.

Read the Engage social dating Press release.

It’s really much easier to see the features and functionality on the Engage site iteself. It sounds complicated in writing but it’s pretty easy and straightforward once you have spent some time on the site. Check out Engage and take it for a spin and be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

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Category:Dating Sites, Innovation Tags: engage.com - social dating
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