Dating site talking head videos are annoying and not very helpful for the most part. I did a survey of several last year and was not impressed. Blond hair and great legs don’t necessarily make for a great sales pitch.

Now the flash ads of the women the appear at the bottom of the screen on adult sites these days, *that* works wonders, those crt/signup rates must be incredibly high.

I’m off to work on my spam email competition entry.

I particularly like the way they presented Zendesk on their home page with a video. Video is the best way to sell this service, short of being sold by an actual salesperson. When will dating sites start using video to explain their USP’s to end users?.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/developers.html

I asked it why I’m still single and it came back with nothing which made me sad.

Seems like they should focus on various domain-specific queries?

Reminds me of Freebase, hopefully there will be an API for the data.

Also, the type of query you put in (just one word) isn’t what it’s really designed to handle (at least not now). It’s designed to compute answers to questions. Instead of putting in just dating try asking what questions you want answered about dating. Also, remember that it has to have access to the necessary data. If you ask how many online daters are actually secretly married it has to have indexed a survey of some sort to get the answers. It can’t answer that now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it did eventually. As it crawls more data and adds to its knowledge it’ll answer more questions.

Another one of its current goals is to be reliable as a reference. If something isn’t a hard fact they’re not bothering with it. Which, in my opinion, is the right way to go. Build up credibility that you indeed give correct answers for what you can understand to the point where you become basically indisputable and then use that gained trust when you expand what’s understood by the system to more hazy topics and less obviously correct sources.