This article is part of a series concerned with building, launching, maintaining and growing dating sites.
Found an article about figuring out the optimal startup burn rate.
New technical term of the week: Dogpiling.
If you are planning, running or about to launch a dating site there are several new initiatives that directly affect your ability to cost-effectively acquire customers from other sites.
If you’re interested in leading edge social dating functionality and their underlying technologies and reducing customer acquisition costs, read on.
ReadWriteWeb says application developers should be tripping over each other to make use of this (oAuth) data so that our use of their apps can be made richer, more powerfully useful and engaging.
There is now no good reason for new applications to ask you for your Gmail username and password in order to access your list of contacts. Don’t give it to them – there’s a standard, approved way for them to access that data now that doesn’t require giving them unlimited access to your entire account.
Apps that don’t use the approved Google user authentication method in short order will be acting like a mail carrier who says they have to have a key to the inside of your house to pick up your mail because they aren’t familiar with the mailbox on the front porch.
Recently Myspace announced the were opening up the service via Data Availability. Any third party developer can now build applications using their APIs. See developer.myspace.com for the details. Of particular interest is the article Why is MySpace doing OpenSocial.
Am I the only one who has been confused by all of the data-sharing announcements of late? It’s incredibly difficult to track all of the announcements, separate what’s solid and mission-ready as opposed to the marketing chaff companies tend to throw off.
If you have a large site with a complicated infrastructure and dread the idea of opening up the hood, this stuff probably isn’t for you.
If you have a small site and don’t have access to a reliable programmer, natch. Unfortunately this is most often the case with readers who contact me. Site gets built, developers takes off.
So we stand at a cross-roads. Most dating sites are not equipped to implement many of these API’s. Widgets are closer to reality for most.
What’s your site doing with the new trend towards openness?
