Friday night I participated in The Man Panel in Boston. More than 40 people showed up to listen to us talk about online dating. We were fortunate enough to have Sam Yagan, CEO of OKCupid sit down and share his insight into online dating and how OKCupid leverages what they know about members to continuously improve the site. Someone I went on a first date with was at the panel, and an ex of mine just emailed to say that a friend of hers was in the audience. Small world. Thanks to Laura Warrell for setting it up and inviting us to participate.
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Gosh, if I had been there, I’d have a field day poking fun at the pathetic state the way this stuff works in 2009!!
OKCupid is a good example. Now once you find a profile here, you may get lucky and a person has answered a lot of questions, taken a lot of tests and written a decent profile that an interested party can get a good sense of that person. But there is no search at all. How can there be? People can leave all their cosmetic/clerical parameters blank. Without making these entries mandatory, the search is all but useless. And OKC is one of the few sites to leave out body type/weight. What’s up with that?
OKC also implements keyword searching, but does it in a way to guarantee its failure. It’s an AND search. So if a person is looking for someone interesting horseback riding, he or she better hope his or her potential match chose that exact phrase and not “equestrian” because there is no way to specify one OR the other.
The irony is that the technology to program this stuff has existed, well, since online dating has been around, and for some reason, the field is completely caught up in the totally irrelevant socializing network frenzy.
OKC, by the way, has an opportunity to use its unique testing to form a sort of mega, dynamic profile on a person. Mega because its tests are a treasure trove of info about a person and dynamic because it allows blogging. And they could use that to create an open profile standard that could ultimately lead to a competition for other dating sties to be the google for dating. That is, blow away the site itself and just make it the profile bank for Internet. Let all the dating sites write their own search engines for it and maintain the email/chat stuff. Paid dating sites would pay it for first dibs on new entries. A new member signs up and their profile is instantly accessible on the paid sites. After 30 days, it becomes available to the free sites.
This also has the huge advantage of a person having to write only one profile and having it appear on dozens of sites essentially automatically.