Annotating Profiles

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Yesterday I was badgering a friend to put up a testimonial for me on Match.com. I have one already, and without fail woman mention it when they email me. I mean email be back, of course. Surely you didn’t think that woman actually initiate conversation on dating sites. Silly newbie, you’ll learn soon enough. If you’re not one of the 10% of alpha mails sending out lots of emails on your dating site, you’re pretty much guaranteed failure.

Since testimonials started on Match, I have seen only one on profiles I’ve browsed, whereas I’ve collected and written scores on LinkedIn. Getting a close friend to write something positive about you is difficult to say the least.

Negative comments are easier to find, there are scores of websites where you can read reviews of people. The problem is that it’s too easy to change usernames or join new sites for these sites to be truly useful.

Yesterday I got an email from WebNotes, a Firefox plugin the enables you to annotate web pages with stickies and highlight text. Annotating web pages is a concept that has been around a long time. Several companies have come and gone trying to make it easier for people to collectively ad perspective, value and insight into existing content. I’ve always hoped that the practice would take off, and now we have several new companies trying to make a go of it. After all, user-generated commentary increases time spent on site, creates community and can be ad-supported.

What if we all started annotating online dating profiles?

There will always be trolls and people out to ruin the party, but with a solid reputation management system in place, comments might be a good way to learn more about people than generic dating profiles. If you don’t want to see the comments, you can turn them off, simple. I shudder to think what people would say about me, “asked to split the bill, total bore, didn’t compliment me enough,” but I think in the future the social aspects of feedback and reputation are going to be tightly integrated with our online representations.

If you install WebNotes, you’ll see that pages like this (fixed link) display highlighted text and sticky notes.