You Got Your Match in My Facebook

A couple of observations about Match and Facebook before I start getting ready to head to LA for iDate tomorrow.

Today I joined the following Facebook fan pages: Victoria’s Secret, Flipping the Pillow Over to Get to the Cold Side, Short Hair and Being barefoot. Then I added Ze Frank the web celebrity as a friend.

In about 30 seconds everyone interested in me is going to know I like freakishly tall women, short hair, being barefoot and “smart” humor. A quick dive into my profile reveals an incredibly detailed view of who I am, my personality and what I pay attention to. All I had to do is click a button to join a few groups that represent my (supposed) interests.

What dating site offers this kind of look into who I am? None, which is why Facebook needs to make a decision about dating and the several hundred million dollars it could earn each year from offering the service to single members.

There are issues with TMI (Too Much Information) and “oversharing” on Facebook, but that’s mostly because the privacy tools are clunky and impossible to understand. Thats a usability issue wrapped in a technology issue. Fixable but not so big a deal that it’s slowing Facebook growth.

Facebook should create a setting called “dating profile” and enable people to add it to the usual mix of tabs at the top of their public pages. Give them a few new privacy controls to share certain pieces of information on their own terms, and we have something approaching a 200-million-strong dating site with relatively little effort on the part of Facebook. Go team!

Or, perhaps Facebook will strike a deal with a major dating site. Match has deals with MSN and Meetic, why not “own” the dating tab on Facebook profiles? This concerns me, because then it’s Match (or some other monolithic dating site) camping out in a Facebook profile tab. Singles shouldn’t settle for more of the same in a larger pool of singles. The Facebook dating service would absolutely have to offer new ways for singles to search, match and communicate. BigCoDatingSite-in-a-tab is not exactly the sea change the online dating industry needs to grow to the next level.

How could the dating industry respond to Facebook adding a dating feature? Go ask Match or eHarmony to add just 5 new questions to their profiles. That would take three months of meetings just to agree on the questions, then fighting to get added to the development schedule, then testing and QA, then finally rollout. Maybe less but you see what I’m getting at. This is the reality of large companies that lack the nimbleness of smaller scrappier startups. I’ll give it to Match that DownToEarth was a pretty solid skunkworks project, but DTE dropped 100k visitors in April, that more traffic than 95% of all dating sites. So much for the great experiment. Side note: Even in this economy, Match US growth is up 10% last month.

Finally, Facebook Layouts App PageRage Super Profile Spreading Quickly: Installed the Firefox plugin, which enables Myspace-like profile page skinning. Only people with the plugin can see the skins though. Hopefully they create an override setting, looking at acid-flashback profile skins on Myspace is part of the reason why so many people can’t stand it.

Off to pack, I’ll try to post a few times in LA from the show.