It seems that Nearly Every Single Topic On Quora Now Has A Twitter Account. Quora is a Question & Answer site, like Yahoo answers without the spam and the trolls. An Incredibly useful service, I almost don’t like talking about Quora because as it grows its bound to lose its exclusivity and “small town” feel.
Many dating startups are following each other on Quora and learning a lot as a collective whole. I chime in from time to time, and often find ex-eHarmony people giving long, thoughtful answers to people’s burning questions.
According to Tech Crunch, nearly every single Quora topic now has a Twitter feed. Oh how I wish that dating site would do something similar and let people update the top of their dating profiles (what shows up in search results) via a Twitter account.
Straightforward to implement, makes profiles more dynamic and Facebook-like instead of set-it-and-forget-it static profiles on Match/eHarmony/POF/Every People Media Site/Spark Networks, etc.
Such an incredible waste of an opportunity to bring a richness, depth and immediacy to dating profiles, which should lead to increased engagement, return visits and more member-to-member communication. If you’re not keeping score, this should lead to better first dates, something that dating sites seem to have lost sight of as they battle to cram their databases full of who-knows-what in order to grow.
Dating sites, you can tell me I’m wrong after you’ve tested more dynamic profiles. If this isn’t a great freemium or VIP upgrade feature, well I’ll take my ball and go home because that means the online dating industry has matured and is so entrenched in its myopic “customer acquisition or bust” (A/B testing ads on Facebook and Google) that its just not that interesting anymore.
As an advisor to the online dating industry who ponders this stuff all the time, more often than not I feel the strong urge to work with Facebook or a startup built on Facebook’s platform. After all, waiting for a handful of incredibly risk-averse dating companies to take things to the next level can be unnecessarily frustrating.
