Good point “Online dating is one of those online industries where you can make money and still be a failure in the eyes of the consumer.”

As I understand it, customers define a successful dating site by the amount of effort it takes (or whether they’re able to at all) to find what they’re looking for (whether it’s a marriage, a hookup or anything in between).

Considering the paid to unpaid member rate (and the limitations on free accounts) I’d say many of the companies that are making money are generally monumental failures in the eyes of the consumers. If 90% or more of your members are unpaid, and paid members try repeatedly to contact users that cannot respond to them, I’d say that would be a highly unsatisfying experience.

But then again, that’s why there are still huge opportunities in this space.

Agree FB is a big question mark, but the signs look promising. Let’s not lose sight that FB is a platform providing unique marketing, revenue and customer acquisition oppotunities.

There are some dating companies based on Facebook launching at DEMO next week.

Thread is off to a nice start, hopefully they learn from the mistakes and mis-steps taken by Engage, a company I helped launch and am all to familiar with the pitfalls Thread faces.

Online dating is one of those online industries where you can make money and still be a failure in the eyes of the consumer. Depends what you categorize as a win.

There continues to be a big question ? surrounding Facebook and whether or not dating is going to mix well IMO.

As for Thread not sure it’s going to succeed, they have VC capital which mirrors that of the original money put together for engage.com. I still think most users don’t want to mix dating and friends. I know I always hated being setup by friends.

There are logical reasons why traditional dating sites keep growing and showing signs of success….they work.

The purpose of a dating site is twofold – and those goals are at odds with each other in most cases. 1) Keep your members on the site to make the most money out of them and 2) Doing a great job of getting your members matched off and off of your site. Unfortunately, many companies do a great job of #1 and do a poor job of #2.

In my opinion — doing a great job of #2 (getting members matched up etc) loses you two members, but probably gets you 5-10 more. Doing a poor job of matching people up, you lose the member anyway, and that pissed off member tells other people not to use the site.

Finally, you mention at least 3 separate platforms – are those unique members or could the same member be counted 3 times by using all platforms. i.e. I use both Twitter and TwitterDeck — am I using Twitter one time or twice?

I would be interested in your definition of “better service”. I stopped using both apps a while ago because I lost interest after a while.

I just installed the Zoosk AIR app, but it looks like a simple activity feed for the service and it opens up web pages when you click on profiles?

Interesting how Zoosk asks for an additional level of access (to post to activity stream) while AYI does not.

How do you differentiate between Zoosk and AYI at this time? My quick take:
AYI has tons more functionality, stuff to do and revenue opportunities. Zoosk still has a really clunky photo viewer, hope that gets replaced, its no good for quick browsing.

AYI never took down my profile when I uninstalled the app, so people are still sending me winks and gifts, which is wrong IMHO. Bad mojo.

This conversation is definitely nowhere close to being over, especially with Thread coming on the scene.

See http://statistics.allfacebook.com/applications/leaderboard/1000000::10000000/-/m/desc/Dating

As for publicly traded companies comment, I am talking about companies listed on major exchanges, not penny stocks :)