For the past few months I’ve been working with CNBC on a new dating special that airs next week. Here’s a clip, which features OKCupid’s Sam Yagan, Match and a few other dating sites.

From the show’s website: NBC News and Today Show Correspondent Amy Robach reveals how online daters are using cutting-edge technology in search of love and how digital entrepreneurs are getting rich helping them do it.

You’ll meet scientists, mathematicians and psychologists who claim they can draw revealing conclusions about you from what you do — and don’t do — on their websites. Can online dating really deliver what it promises? CNBC takes you inside a business trying to unlock the secrets of the human heart with science.

Love at First Byte: The Secret Science of Online Dating
Premieres Thursday, February 9th 9p | 10p | 12a | 1a ET

Related posts:

1. The Science of Love
2. NBC Teams up with Perfectmatch for Science Of Love
3. Science of Love on NBC

 Had a great time today at Harvard Business School being interviewed on-camera by Amy Robach from CNBC/Today Show. Amy and her cohorts were wrapping up filming for a big story about online dating.

After talking to the fantastic producers and collecting stats (never easy in the world of online dating), it was fun to get in front of the camera and tell some stories and anecdotes about the business of online dating.

I’ll post the date the segment airs as soon as the show page is up at CNBC.

Its funny how my big interviews always happen towards the end of December every year like clockwork.

Related posts:

1. Yours Truly on CNBC
2. Online Dating Insider In the News
3. Online Dating Insider Week in Review 4-11-08

ChristianCafe.com co-founder Sam Moorcroft was recently on a national Canadian Christian TV show called “Full Circle”. The show featured a former hostess of the show who met and married her husband from ChristianCafe.com. Talk about a great testimonial. Sam enters around the 5:25 mark, dishing the  inside scoop on the growing popularity of online dating.

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Here are a few photos from eAmore NYC Dating Industry Summit. More at the eAmore Facebook page. Attendee survey is going out today, please fill it out. Video of the event should be ready in the next week or so.

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Just got off the phone with Joel Schwartz, who is busy getting ready to launch a voice-based social networking tool called Parlor.fm at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

Some of you may remember Joel from iDate in Miami a few years ago when he was at Teltech, which debuted it’s LoveDetect service. I absolutely loved that service but Teltech seems to have ended up focusing on spoofing caller ID and other telcom apps.

Parlor is a unique, voice-based social network featuring an array of interconnected mini-apps to suit a variety of business and social purposes. Parlor is integrating the quality and intimacy of voice communication with the high-speed connectivity of the digital world.

One reason I am partial to the idea of voice-based social networking is because I wrote a business plan outlining a VOIP-based social network based on Skype almost six years ago.

With nothing to test at Parlor yet, all we can do is debate whether or not people want to talk more on the phone, or less, and in what context. Much of what Parlor will do is already done by millions of people via Skype. So the question becomes, what can Parlor do better than Skype? Perhaps there is a value-added feature, or unintended consequence that will drive Parlor’s adoption rates.

Do 20-somethings want to talk on the phone to strangers? How about the over 50 crowd? Singles do this on late-night chat lines. Business people don’t want to be on the phone, it kills productivity in many cases. How would a business leverage voice? I see you on LinkedIn, I arrange to directly contact you or get a warm introduction, we email back and forth for a round and then move to a phone conversation. Would I do this on Parlor instead of or in addition to LinkedIn?

I haven’t had a fax machine or a landline for almost a decade and I almost exclusively use Skype or Facetime on iPhone. The idea of calling a phone number to chat with people in this day and age feels positively antiquated. Voice and video profiles, now there’s something. Perhaps there are enough people on the planet who would love to talk to each other and bring a bit of the Myspace discovery functionality to the networking-with-friends world of Facebook.

Maybe there are millions of people who want to talk about model trains or politics. I don’t know. What I do know is that Facebook will roll out some sort of voice feature in the near future, but that doesn’t mean that Parlor can’t find its footing in a specific age range, demographic, interest group or even dating.

I have worked with a number of VOIP and voice-based startups over the years. Most have had wins in business sectors and flailed in the consumer space. Something tells me that Parlor needs a video component to really catch the eye of consumers.

Dating sites, would you use something like Parlor to bring members closer together on your site?

Full Parlor.fm press release.

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Shawn Parker and Sean Fanning are at it again. You know them as the founders of Napster and you saw Mr. Parker in the Social Network.

Remember Chatroulette and how exciting it was until you saw your 23rd crotch shot in the first 10 minutes? Parker and Fanning were both involved with the highly-visible real-time chat program. The problem? After a big media splash, people stopped using the service and the founder was left pondering the question, of how to Monetize 50,000 Naked Men.

Chatroulette never really recovered, and a number of clones emerged, none of which made much of an impact except for being popular search terms driving people here.

Parker and Fanning are back with  project Supyo (“What’s up, yo”), a web-based video chat service that aims to connect like-minded people (full article at TechCrunch).

The two masterminds believe that live interaction between people is the next big thing in social networking. Guess who else agrees with them? Rob Glasser, the founder of Real Networks, who just launched SocialEyes on Facebook. As if things weren’t interesting enough, Tech Crunch’s own Michael Arrington is involved with project Supyo.

As usual, the adult industry has beaten everyone to the punch, capitalizing on free live video and tipping/bidding, long before dating sites like What’s Your Price popped up on the radar. But that is to be expected.

I saw this all coming together when I was writing a business plan to create Skype Cafe five years ago. The idea was interest and geography-based Skype chat rooms. We were too early on that one but it was and is a killer idea as evidenced by the recent spate of big names and funding. Not to mention the fact that people are slowly becoming more comfortable with video, which brings us all a step closer to the real-time connected web.

Crystal ball moment: First we had books, now we have computers. The next step is losing the wires and participating in consciousness-based networks. Think Matrix and meta meditation. Fascinating stuff.

Live-blogging, live events, chat, updates, tweets and video are all hot topics. How hot? Supyo is supposedly going to raise $10 million very soon.

While Speeddate is good at making tons of money on live video dates, live social video is going to be orders of magnitude larger in terms of opportunity and market size. Just look at how many people do live video chat on Skype as an indicator of where things are going.

There have been webcam chat programs and Instant Messenger apps around for over a decade, but anyone who has ever been in an AOL or Yahoo chat room know those were heavy on the yuk factor.

Smart people keep talking about the value of live local video. From the dating perspective there is little reason to go out on a first date without first having a videochat to see if the other person is worth it. Why local? I don’t want to talk to someone in another country, I want a date I can drive to. Show me all women within 25 miles of me who can do video on their phones or laptops and invite them to videochat with me (if I pass through their requirements filter.) Facetime on the iPhone or Skype is brilliant for this.

People will argue against video introductions all day long but they are not seeing the big picture. The rest of us would like to save ourselves from bad first dates, pricey dinners and the “I’m 1/2-way into my first drink and this is not working” feeling singles are all-too familiar with.

There are going to have to be all sorts of ways to keep men’s pants on and the community manageable (insert usual paragraph about trust, reputation and identity). That is what we call non-trivial and why I’m sure Supyo will end up going through several iterations until they figure out the right balance of permissiveness and community.

It will be interesting to see how people around the world start using live videochat when its tied into the social graph (how Facebook knows about your friends and their friend and how you’re all connected). I don’t think anyone can know how it will be used until everyone has their cameras turned on. There will be brilliant services, found love, weird stuff and plenty of problems along the way, but thats pretty much the norm for disruptive social tools.

Social sites offering video with a dating component or dating sites offering video profiles and chat. Which has a better chance of being adopted by singles?

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I am having a blast taking people’s photos and running them through FaceReader from Profiler1. Not to be confused with this competing Face Reader.

Here are some notes culled from discussion with Profiler1 and pulled from their website.

Profiler1 has automated the science of personality analysis using facial features and is now making it available for use on dating sites via the brand new API.

The company offers three different kinds of services facilitated by taking a snapshot or choosing a member’s photo.

The first service is a “Quick Face Reading” which utilizes a special server algorithm and facial recognition system allowing it to read any human face. The replies cover a variety of personality traits and offer descriptions

The second service is called “A Full Face Reading”. This is a more in-depth report due to the fact that one of the experts is also involved in the analyzing process and is able to generate dozens of personality trait assessments.

The 3^rd service as described by Profiler1:

“Personality Match – is the coolest feature your site could ever have. It lets the users choose their spouse’s preferred personality traits at which point our service presents the most suitable matches within your site.

Personology is a diagnostic method used regularly in face-to-face communications workshops, relationship or partner coaching sessions and more. Personology is known for its reliability and accuracy. It is the science of exposing an individual’s personality based on one’s facial structure. Personology has been confirmed to be 92% accurate based on observations and statistical research done in 1950-1963.

The company is about to provide the service through one of the major russian dating sites called Lovplanet.ru.

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In yesterday’s post, SocialEyes Brings Video Chat to Facebook, I wrote about a new video service launching on Facebook.

Silicon Valley A-list videoblogger Robert Scoble left a comment that he interviewed the SocialEyes team. I still have my Quickcam vido ball from 1993 and have used just about every videoconferencing service out there. By the end of the video I think you’ll be as impressed as I was with SocialEyes.

Dear Chatroulette, this is what you should have built last year instead of trying to Monetize 50,000 Naked Men.

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Its always been remarkable to me that more people do not post video status updates to their Facebook pages. Well, it looks like Video messaging is coming to Facebook.

Rob Glasser, founder of RealNetworks, has co-founded SocialEyes, which is launching at the DEMO Conference today.

Gigaom says:

The service, which will live as its own site and as a Facebook application, allows users to carry on multiple chats throughout the day and lets people tap Facebook’s social graph for conversations. Users can pop in and out of individual chats or combine them together in group sessions called scrums. Users can also join or start their own private groups among friends or participate in public groups based around hobbies and interests. When users aren’t able to communicate in real-time via video chat or instant messaging, they can send video messages to friends.

I worked with someone on exactly this type of service in 2006, although they didn’t have the resources to make this happen at the time and there wasn’t a 600-million member Facebook to market it to.

How long until Facebook gets serious about video and bakes this right into the service?

Read SocialEyes Taps Facebook Social Graph For Video Chatting.

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