Research is important and valuable (I just got done watching Inconvenient Truth), but saying this and that about social network usage is simply taking a snapshot of yesterday and today, with little discussion about tomorrow and what may come.

“the gifts they display,
the music they discuss
and
the photos they post in their activity stream”

video preferences, color preferences, bookmarks preferences, handwriting analysis, purchases and buying trends and other methods like them, == lack of precision by distortion!

In a previous post, last Dec. 2, 2009, you said you are going to interview Dr. Jeffrey T. Hancock of Cornell University’s department of communication and faculty of information science.

Please, read all the research Dr. Hancock et al. conducted over Online Dating and Social Networking sites before interviewing him because it explains why Serious Online Dating (serious daters = the ones who want to achieve a long term relationship with commitment or marriage) is impossibe over Social Networking.

“Making Sense of Strangers’ Expertise from Signals in Digital Artifacts” Conference of Human Interactions April 4–9, 2009

“The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles” Conference of Human Interactions Proceedings Online Representation of Self April 28-May 3,2007

“Deception and Design: The Impact of Communication Technology on Lying Behavior” Conference of Human Interactions Proceedings (2004), 129-134.

and the paper written by Drs. Gosling, Gaddis & Vazire

“Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles” 2007

Regards,

Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com

Asian and white women all from the same Texas school. Paid compensation. Hardly a good cross-section of FB users IMHO.

“Participants then embarked upon a series of assessments that are not pertinent to the findings discussed here.” What assessments, how do we know they were not pertinent?

“10 photos randomly selected from the galleries linked to a user’s main page”. Profiles were saved to a hard drive. No ability to see activity stream in action, no sense of photo sets, where’s the real-time aspect of social networking?

I’d like to see this run again with more people and real-time access to FB. Don’t know if it would change the results, but I feel like I could identify people who are depressed, neurotic or extroverted pretty well.

I certainly hope they don’t read any stuffy research reports, rather see them throwing parties and getting sexy.

There is much to be learned about a person by the gifts they display, the music they discuss and the photos they post in their activity stream. I think you call this behavioral residue. There is zero research that I have read into how the mind interpolates this data to make a decision as to whether or not someone gets an email or not. I’ll go read your report and see what’s what.

You can call it dating 2.0 or whatever buzzword you want, but you’re missing the point entirely. If you don’t understand the value of the site, move along.

“all the features they feel necessary to accurately reflect a person’s tastes and preferences” ???????

accurately ?

How are they going to achieve that? With ipsative instruments as those sliders and self-description / self-reported data? That is the wrong way!

“A social network where dating can happen”, but that is only for fun, for flirting, for entertainment purposes, for instant gratification.

The intro video ends saying “Come as you are” as Chemistry used to say in their ads some time ago.

I recommend to read these paper:

1)
“Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles”
“….. Here we examine impressions based on 133 Facebook profiles, comparing them with how the targets see themselves and are seen by close acquaintances. As in our previous research, results show generally strong patterns of convergence, although the accuracy correlations vary considerably across traits. Findings are discussed with regard to the increasing role of technology-borne
………….
Extraversion was the only Big Five trait that showed evidence for meta-accuracy….
………..
”

In other words, browsing profiles at social networking sites, any person will assess quite well the level of Extraversion of the other persons and not well the other 4 personality traits (BIG 5 MODEL).

2)
“Making Sense of Strangers’ Expertise from Signals in Digital Artifacts” Conference of Human Interactions April 4–9, 2009,

“Participating in social computing technologies afford individuals the ability to perform selective self-presentation and impression management. Individuals can portray themselves through personal homepages and social networking profiles as they would like to be perceived.
While research on online profiles is clearly emerging, recent findings show that individuals quickly form impressions of personality traits of others from online profiles. The impressions formed from these profiles also appear to be accurate. Perceivers’ personality trait ratings of Facebook profiles showed some correlation with users’ own self ratings and friends’ ratings. [Extraversion was the only Big Five trait that showed evidence for meta-accuracy, "Personality Impressions Based on Facebook Profiles" (2007)] However, recent research also shows that there is deception involved in online profiles, raising issues of the credibility of information found online.
”

Without a normative personality test, accurately is impossible to achieve!

BlackBox Republic is only an Online Dating Site 2.0: Matching based on Self-Reported Data for fun, for flirting, for entertainment purposes, for instant gratification and not for serious dating.

Nothing new.

Regards,

Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com