Social dating site Thread appears to be going in the direction of a Zook or Are You Interested clone. I was hoping this wouldn’t be the case. Meeting friends of friends is obviously a the primary way people connect, but more incessant clicking is not what I was expecting. I asked a few friends about their friends today, will be interesting to see what they write back. Thread relies on Facebook’s email functionality to ask people about their friends. This is smooth, but what if FB cuts them off? The entire business fails, at least until they can put a workaround in place. I’m guessing they will leverage FB, build up a few million users, then move them over to Thread.com, just like every other social dating company does once they reach a certain size.
I’m a rookie matchmaker. We’ll see how well I do hooking up guys with my single female friends. I should be able to charge guys to meet my friends, where’s the PayPal option? You think I’m going to just hand over someone’s contact information? This is going to be a thorny issue moving forward for Thread.
Related Posts
Additional Thoughts on ThreadThread Offers Matchmaker Rewards
Thread and Facebook, Perfect Together?
Online Dating Links For 8-28-09
SecondLove Launches On Facebook
{ 1 trackback }
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Trackback message
Title: Social comments and analytics for this post
Excerpt: This post was mentioned on Twitter by datingnieuws: Thread Slowing Rolling out New Features http://bit.ly/8qAoDA
Blog name: uberVU – social comments
Hi Dave!
It’s Katherine from Thread. Thanks for checking out our site again! Just want to answer some of your questions…
Under Find Matches, in your Daily Shuffle… When you click Yes on someone, we’ll send notifications to that person saying “a friend of friend thinks you’re cute”. When they click the link, we’ll show them 8 people, one of which is you. If they also think you’re cute, we’ll let you know. Basically, it becomes a double-blind match game that makes it safe to express interest in friends of friends… kind of like speed dating.
The Facebook folks we know are totally on board with our using FB Messaging to initiate friend-friend messages. In fact, that is the direction they’re heading, to encourage apps to use the FB Inbox rather than requests/invites for communication. (Soon they’ll also launch a way for developers to email users directly, bypassing the FB inbox altogether. This could be another alternative for us if the FB inbox doesn’t work out.)
The great thing about matchmaking on Facebook is you don’t actually have to share your friends’ contact info with one another… you can just intro them via the FB inbox (which anybody can do today). If one friend ends up wanting to block your other friend they can choose do so on Facebook. And really, you can intro them any way you feel most comfortable — on FB, in person, over email. As long as the connection is happening (even if off-Thread), we are happy.
As for charging $ to hook up your friends, let’s see how good your matches are before we get to that point. Maybe someday you can charge matchmaker revenues and drop this whole blog/consulting thing. :)
Thanks so much for following us — we love your commentary. Yours is the smartest, most tech savvy dating blog out there. And I am not just saying that!
Cheers,
–Katherine, COO Thread.com
P.S. Did you mean “Slowly” rather than “Slowing” in your title? Just curious!