This morning I had a Skype videochat with Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg and Shar Dubey, Vice President of Product. Mandy and Shar took some time out of their busy Internet Week in New York schedule to share supplemental detail to the Match blog posts and press releases flying around the intewebs today.

Let’s start with a few paragraphs from the boilerplate announcement.

Match.com, the largest dating site in the world, is transforming the American dating experience with new, innovative features for connecting people that eliminate the distinction between online and offline dating. Rolling out nationally over the coming weeks, Match.com will launch The Stir, a service that brings single people together in thousands of events across the country, and a proprietary collection of dual-player games designed to let people get to know each other online in a fun, natural way. The games will be available to all Match.com subscribers this summer, and the Stir will begin rolling out in more than 20 U.S. cities by June and nationwide by September.

Match blog post: The Stir: Events by Match.com.

“Our mission has always been to help single people have more success at meeting new people, in order to give them a better chance of starting a relationship,” said Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg. “Now the advent of new technologies has allowed us to leverage our massive national membership scale to meaningfully expand the extent and nature of the positive impact we can have, and to make it more fun and natural along the way.”

Notice how the company line is to give people a better chance of starting a relationship. They never promise that their matching algorithms are perfect, only that they will surface, or expose to you the most appropriate people (according to Match). After all, people are really good at screwing up relationships, Match just takes the credit for introducing them to you. The nuance of this statement seems to be lost on a lot of people.

Fun and natural is not a phrase commonly associated with online dating. Will the re-introduction of live events make dating via Match more fun and natural? Lets find out.

Consider the phrase “Leveraging massive national membership” from the press release. This is something that most dating startups don’t seem to grok at a deep enough level. Match and Spark and POF and several other sites will out-bid you on keywords on Facebook and Google so badly that you will never have a chance at competing with them. Thats a fact of the business. I’ve never seen a new dating site in a decade that didn’t make it to the big time without an enormous marketing budget. It doesn’t matter if you’re mobile, or friends matching friends or you give every new member $25.

With 10-20,000 new members every day (a mix of paid and free subscribers), Match can afford to try something new every once in a while. Not that they venture outside of their comfort zone very often. But who’s to blame them, mo’ members, mo’ money has been the name of the game for Match the last few years. The company has around 1.7 million paying members, with three million people paying a subscription fee over course of the year.

When it comes to marketing, Match is going to to a big push around Events and Games (we’ll talk about games later), including television. I love the Match TV ads, which strike a positive note while depicting first dates, traditionally perceived as very uncomfortable experiences. Hopefully we can show you the new ads here before they launch nationally in the US.

Match has been doing a number of test market events, focusing on different crowds ranging from young to urban, gray-hairs and even the gay market.

We’ve talked about MatchLive in previous posts. That was a decade ago before everyone involved with the new Match initiatives were even at the company. After a decade of online dating, perhaps singles will warm up to the idea of congregating with other singles expressly at a given location to meet others interested in forming relationships.

Then its just a matter of Match’s silicon brain inviting the right people to the events. Cooking classes are stupid, I don’t want to hang out with losers at some lame bar on a Monday night. I want to drink scotch and then hunt deer with grenade-tossing brunettes. An extreme example  the breadth and diversity of singles in America, but indicative of the challenge Match faces as they strike various event partnerships, which will be super-important to the success of the Events initiative.

Now, let’s talk mobile.

The Stir will feature a whole bevy of functionality focused on increasing pre, during and post-event discovery and messaging. See who’s going to be at an event, discover like-minded folks during events, and stay in touch with them afterwards. During the event, food, drink and other specials will be offered via mobile as well.

While lots of people have smart phones, the majority are still using feature phones. That was great when Dodgeball was *the* social networking app for mobile, but these days, getting a solid feature set to run across myriad phones is a PITA. Match is going to be trying and testing things to see what works best for the largest amount of people.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Crowded Room app has nothing to do with The Stir. I would have thought that with all the effort IAC, Match’s parent company, put into CR, that it might be part of the mobile aspect of Events & Games. Not so.

Talking about mobile Shar said something interesting, that they would love to have technology like Bump for sharing information. I’ve been using Bump for years, and am surprised that it’s not been acquired and rolled into iOS as a baked-in feature. Sharing custom contacts and photos, revealing only what you feel comfortable with a certain person, is a great way to network. At first you get a few photos of me and my throwaways gmail address. If things progress nicely, I’ll share more personal information, perhaps even my Facebook URL.

At The Stir, answering questions in order to be connected with people is in the works. Kind of reminds me of Lock And Key Parties, which are actually quite fun, if not overly analog in a digital dating world.

Oh, and The Stir is not going to have speed dating, so 8 MinuteDating and all the rest don’t have anything to worry about. Now Speeddate.com, something tells me they should be a bit nervous.

Besides the algorithm improvements (can I get an ROI on that please?), the last Match feature of any import that I remember talking about was Daily 5, and that was several years ago. Granted, over the last few years Match went out and bought most of their competition. People Media, Meetic, OkCupid. who else is there to buy that can contribute meaningfully to the Match empire? I’m not talking just eyeballs, but value to the company, in terms of innovation. Its too bad that the dating industry doesn’t take after Facebook, buying a few companies a month, usually called talent acquisitions, to bolster certain areas like matching, messaging and meetups.

Back to the Company Line:

The Stir, consisting of hundreds of local events each month, will range from large-scale happy hours to more intimate events, such as cooking classes, wine and tequila tastings, dance lessons, bowling nights, rock climbing and more.

A big part of meeting people is going out and being social, and the Stir improves that “going out” experience. When you go to a Stir event, everyone will be single, everyone will be looking to meet someone, and each event will be customized through our group matching algorithms in terms of age, gender and interests. In short, the Stir addresses some of the fundamental pitfalls of a typical night out for single people.

Members can learn about and sign up for these events via Match.com, and subscribers can even invite friends and bring them along as an added benefit. At each local event, attendees can leverage their mobile devices by checking in and receiving special offers from the venues on food and beverages. Over the coming months, Match.com plans to introduce other ways for online elements to enhance the event experience, such as the ability to invite other members to an event, create in-event engagement, and re-connect online afterward.

As part of an ongoing beta program, Match.com has organized 60 Stir events across 10 U.S. markets to date. The response has been tremendous, and the initiative will accelerate by September to include over 200 events each month, with thousands of people participating every week.

Like most cocktail parties, Match has observed that the first 45 minutes of singles events can be uncomfortable. After that, people tend to relax and loosens up, due to alcohol intake or just that sense of “What the hell, I’m here, might as well make the best of it.” Getting people to stick around that first 45 minutes is key. If I went to a Match event, I’d show up right when it starts.

Match has created a new Events business unit to manage the many moving parts behind getting hundreds of thousands of people to attend hundreds of events each month. The logistics behind marketing, managing third-parties like cooking schools that take payment for services and have to share that money with Match, evolving the algorithm to suggest better blends of compatible singles, and many other tasks, is no doubt daunting.

Speaking of algorithms, its interesting to see Match extracting additional value out of their greatly-improved matching system. I’ll leave it to you to define greatly improved, but allegations of ineffective matching systems aside, the Match system is pretty amazing and its great to see them leveraging it to create pop-up singles events with at least a bit of the randomness removed.

I learned long ago that certain types of people will always say dating algorithms doen’t work. I’m tired of that discussion. Of course they don’t work very well, but at least dating sites are beginning to make an effort to move matchmaking out of the Paleolithic era. Nothing else I or anyone else can say or do is going to change this anytime soon. Remember, dating sites are simply introduction services. Once you make them out to be more than that, you put them on a wobbly pedestal thats guaranteed to disappoint some of us from time to time.

eBay needs to be perfect, days in and day out. Online dating is, and will always be, a best-effort industry.

Creating more meaningful connections is what Match is about, and they are getting serious about innovating past the “online dating hasn’t changed in a decade” argument that is perpetually thrown at the industry. With The Stir, Match has two primary areas of focus, increasing customer lifetime value and converting free members and their friends into subscribers, all while we’re checking in to locations, getting free drinks and chilling out with other singles at freeform early-week bar takeovers or more structured, fee-based events. After talking to Mandy and Shar, I’m pretty optimistic about the new services. I’ll definitely make the trip into Boston to go to one of them to check it out to see how different they are from the many other live events I’ve attended over the years.

As I was writing this I came across SceneTap on VentureBeat.

Imagine this. You and your girlfriend walk into a neighborhood bar, order a cocktail, and, unbeknownst to you both, a camera above is scanning your faces to determine your age and gender. Your deets are combined with data on other bar patrons and then spit out to looky-loo mobile application users trolling for a good-time venue with the right genetic make-up.

SceneTap is a maker of cameras that pick up on facial characteristics to determine a person’s approximate age and gender. The company works with venues to install these cameras and track customers. It also makes web and mobile applications that allow random observers to find out, in real-time, the male-to-female ratio, crowd size, and average age of a bar’s patrons.

And you thought Facebook and Google knew a lot about you. Seems like the natural evolution of Assisted Serendipity. The Chicago-based startup went live in San Francisco at 25 bars on Friday.

Next up, Calling All Players: Match.com Wants You

Related posts:

1. Match.com Re-Launching Match Live Events?
2. JDate live events
3. Live Events making a comeback

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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