Online Dating Insider » Identity

The State Of Online Dating Academic Research

David Evans — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 14:21:37 +0000

New York Times has compiled a Latest Hits of online dating and relationship research. As with a new John Mayer or Coldplay album, with most dating research you already know what you’re going to get even before you dig into the data.

While somewhat enlightening, I’ve been listening to the same people say the same thing for a almost a decade now. The only difference is the nuance and surprise that researches tend to exhibit when it comes to the most basic stats that anyone who’s been on a dating site for more than a week would know.

I’d like to see a single research report that has led to innovation, increased efficiency a higher happiness quotient for dating site members.

I’m still waiting…

Major dating sites had more than 593 million visits in the United States last month. Now that gave me pause. That’s probably about 500 million for Match properties and the remainder spread around to The Niches.

Someone should do a study on the number of people who met their mate online and see what their happiness and divorce rates are. In particular, eHarmony, Plentyoffish (or do we call it POF now, I don’t get it.)

Here’s my favorite campaign-season stat. Let’s mine the most generic profile stats and pretend we are amazed that people’s politics actually makes a difference in picking a mate. Of course trotting out the only bi-party relationship in the world, James Carville and Mary Matalin. I vote that no one ever mentions those two again in regards to relationships ever again.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the most important finding in the article:

What people say they want in a mate and what qualities they actually seek don’t tend to correspond,” said Coye Cheshire, an associate professor at the School of Information at Berkeley who has studied this with Mr. Fiore, Professor Mendelsohn and Lindsay Shaw Taylor, a member of the school’s self, identity and relationships lab.

Finally, an interesting point is (re-)made, Bravo. This is a key point behind behavioral matching. What you think you want and what you actually need are often two totally different things. Dating sites like Match and OKCupid and POF get this, and are (one hopes) continuing to evolve their matching systems to take user behavior into consideration.

I find this absolutely fascinating and could talk about it all day. Unfortunately there are few people in the industry that a) believe and b) understand this stuff enough to put it into action on dating sites. And even less that want to have a beer and dig into the details.

If Zoosk made $100 million this year and they have the Zoosk matching system thats so powerful, then how come its not mentioned here?

Badoo reads this stuff and laughs. Matching systems, we don’t need to stinkin’ matching systems. Oops, we just billed your credit card another $25, enjoy talking to the 436,632 non-english speaking people (that aren’t really) in your area.

Everyone knows that dating profiles bring a bare minimum of insight into one’s personality. Where’s the fascinating research into facial coding, astrology, and a few other Big Important Useful things that would make online dating so much easier and effective? The resistance of the online dating industry to even express a modicum of interest in these ideas remains a sad point. If there was no Netflix prize, I doubt anyone would be doing behavioral matching in online dating at this time.

Look at how Google and Facebook innovate, each and every month. Go look at 10 niche dating sites. All owned by the same few companies, running the same 5-year-old templates, with seriously underpowered search engines. Now we’re going to go through niche site saturation, which is going to kill off a whole bunch of dating sites over the next few years, but that’s a story for another time.

The Times article goes on to say that The Journal of Communication used computer analysis to show that four linguistic indictors can help detect lying in the personal essay of a dating profile. I thought we had figured this out a long time ago? That’s what I was working on at Profile Doctor back in 2004.

Overweight and short people lie on dating sites all the time. The dating industry needs to stop talking about how people lie, take some pride and responsibility and do a better job creating more dynamic profiles that accurately reflect a person’s tastes and preferences, regardless of the teeth-grinding dullness they fill their profile essays with.

Why not offer verified photos and an identity check and remove the problem from the table? Oh wait, that hasn’t worked so far, let those fat short old people lie to their heart’s content. Ka-ching!

Researchers found a very high rate of same-ethnicity dating. Just like they did last year, and the year before that (They also found that people breath air). This is where (sadly) someone reading this is thinking, “ZOMG! I need to start a white-only niche dating site.” Actually that’s a great idea for the home-wreckers at Ashely Madi$on. Go for it guys, make us proud.

Thanks to our merry band of intrepid researchers and the NY Times, we know all too well what opaque (not our fault blame the dating site!) and sad liars online daters are (your truly included). Now its time to do something about it. I had no idea that I could go ask the National Science Foundation for a grant to do some research that actually improves online dating.

I wonder who’s press release kicked this story off?

No related posts.

Do Background Checks Have a Place in Online Dating?

David Evans — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 18:27:12 +0000

A while back the New York Times said New Online-Date Detectives Can Unmask Mr. or Ms. Wrong. There are hundreds of background check companies that offer services directly to singles. They all think they can make money in the dating market. Truth is, except for one or two companies with direct dating site partnerships, dating sites for the most part don’t want to offer background checks and these third-party solutions are going to require huge online marketing budgets to get the attention of singles.

Some dating site slooooowly appear to be warming up to the idea of identity verification, which has its own set of thorny issues in terms of how people react to search results with some people being verified and others not. At some point do I lose out if I’m not verified? Why do I have to pay more just to be on even ground with everyone else? And how will free sites deal with this? A freemium upgrade or avoid them entirely?

And how the heck do you ask someone to get verified? Talk about awkward. There are actually some neat ways to go about enticing people to sign up for these services, but I’m not seeing them used out in the wild.

The “We don’t to background checks” text that sites are placing on their home pages hasn’t stopped bad people from doing bad things. For this you can thank True.com for putting the legislative wheels in motion. A great marketing angle on their part. What the current legislation has done is get the industry to realize that many singles incorrectly assume that dating sites already offer verification services.

The problem with ID verification and background checks are that singles need to buy them, dating sites will never absorb the cost themselves. They are only worthwhile if everyone is verified by the site, which is not going to happen anytime soon at mainstream dating sites.

However, a few new entrants such as Tru.ly are doing some very interesting things with verification and identity. Keep an eye on them because they really understand the value of multi-use verifications, not just background checks for dating.

While I applaude dating sites taking some initiative to help make singles safer, a working solution that sites and singles can both be comfortable with is a long way off. The reality of the situation is that common sense is 1000 times more effective than any system put in placbackground check or verification systems that dating sites put in place.

Image: SafeDate t-shirt from 2005. They were one of the first background check companies to pitch the dating industry.

No related posts.

Tru.ly Launches First Ever Age Verification API Based on Government Issued Data

David Evans — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 19:38:09 +0000

I have been watching Boston-based verification company Tru.ly closely for the past year or so. They have just released an age verification API that authenticates the age of an online user based on government issued data. Tru.ly cross-references user-submitted personal information to guarantee authenticated age. Tru.ly’s API is based on the Facebook registration application, which allows users and the partner sites to have a frictionless experience when proving their age.

This is good news for dating sites, some of which are a good fit for this sort of service. Anything to get people to stop lying about their age.

I suspect partnerships with scale manufacturers and a “most recent photo” verification service are around the corner.

I wonder how it will affect the “10 years older than I say I am” fib.

No related posts.

Is Match Preparing To Launch A Facebook App?

David Evans — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 16:47:56 +0000

Given the previous post about Match supposedly wanting to build a Badoo clone on Facebook, I decided to poke around the raw html that the Match web servers send to web browsers, which in turn create the Match web pages we look at millions of times every day around the world.

I learned a few things.

To begin with, all Match profiles are Facebook “objects”. Facebook considers just about everything it touches as an “object” and gives it its own unique identifier (like an IP address or social security number, everyone has a unique one. In fact, This blog has been an Object that Facebook knows about for a long time.

Making everything an object makes sense, because as Facebook evolves from a destination to a distributed platform touching everything on the net, they want to be able to reach out and touch, search, share, read and modify as much of the content on the Internet as possible, including my likes, friends, wall posts, apps, etc.

To show you how easy it is to look at people’s personal information on Facebook, check out these examples. Even if you do it with a browser that is not currently logged into Facebook, you can retrieve a fair amount of information about someone or a Fan page.

If you click https://graph.facebook.com/relaxedguy you will see basic information that Facebook knows about me.

{
“id”: “501791841″,
“name”: “David Evans”,
“first_name”: “David”,
“last_name”: “Evans”,
“link”: “http://www.facebook.com/relaxedguy”,
“username”: “relaxedguy”,
“gender”: “male”,
“locale”: “en_US”
}

My Facebook profile photo http://graph.facebook.com/relaxedguy/picture.

Coca-Cola’s Facebook page https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola.

{
“id”: “40796308305″,
“name”: “Coca-Cola”,
“picture”: “http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/203509_40796308305_256509_s.jpg”,
“link”: “http://www.facebook.com/coca-cola”,
“likes”: 32007587,
“category”: “Food/beverages”,
“website”: “http://www.coca-cola.com”,
“username”: “coca-cola”,
“founded”: “1886″,
“products”: “Coca-Cola is the most popular and biggest-selling soft drink in history, as well as the best-known product in the world.\n\nCreated in Atlanta, Georgia, by Dr. John S. Pemberton, Coca-Cola was first offered as a fountain beverage by mixing Coca-Cola syrup with carbonated water….”
}

Enough generic examples, lets’ get to the good stuff.

Primer: The “og:somedata” stuff seen below is what site owners put invisibly at the top of each page they want Facebook to consider an object. For this blog, at the moment its the same details for all pages. For Match, each person is an Object that has special attributes like username, photo url and a few other things.

One of my Match usernames.

My Match profile web address and the super-special unique identifier.

My full profile address (Match login required)

Facebook application ID number. This doesn’t look like a regular number, its way too long. Can anyone explain what it is, like a placeholder?

Beginning of one of my profiles, edited down for length.

I’m not sharp enough to decode the possible relationship between the “uid” and the picture url, but the big issue is that over 100 million Match user photos are freely available for anyone to download. (20 million members, average of 5 photos per member = 100 million give or take).

To be fair, Match could be testing this with 500 people and photos aren’t linked to personal information (although embedding meta-data in photos via steganography and other means is done all the time on certain sites).

Also seen in the raw html that comprised Match profiles is the following text:

Upload a Photo & Unlock Hers
Her Photos are Unlocked!

This looks like a Facebook call-to-action. I have to upload a photo to see another person’s photos. Or its another one of those Match features that I never pay attention to, we’ll know soon enough.

What if Match is looking to expose profiles on Facebook as a way to drive Facebook users to Match? This is sort of what they did on a trial basis with Are You Interested a few years ago. But I have a feeling that Match is going for something much bigger. Perhaps even to be the de facto dating site for Facebook.

The dating industry has been discussing this for years, but the fact that Match and Facebook could be partnering on something so big (the Dating tab at the top of your FB profile), well it just boggles the mind. A dating site with hundreds of millions of people on it.

Of course, perhaps the Facebook object code has been there for many moons and I’m way off-base, I certainly don’t view the html source of every dating site I come across (but maybe we all should).

We we do know is that everything is an object to Facebook and that Match has made it so that all 20 million members (arguable) and their photos are objects that Facebook knows about and can act upon. I’m not entirely clear how the bi-directionality of such a situation would pan out, but I can’t wait for the moment a Match-branded Facebook application asks for my permission to access my personal data and write on my wall while being tied to my Match profile.

Put it this way, its either going to rock right out of the gate or risks being another Little Black Book, Match’s first Facebook app. Last time I checked it had 19 active users. But that was years ago, and Match has gotten much smarter about the power of social.

What are the implications of having tighter integration between Match and Facebook? Perhaps such actions as changes to your Match profile, a new photo, a search completed, an email sent, a wink sent, a profile blocked, could end up on your Facebook wall, or at least tracked and your actions used to personalize, drive traffic, attract eyeballs, etc.These actions have showed up on the Match member home page mini-wall for two years now.

Perhaps mini versions of Match profiles will show up in Facebook search. That would actually be pretty cool. Match is well on its way to extending the “wall” concept of publishing updates such as “Someone you have expressed interest in or we think you would like has updated/uploaded/done some other action” to the entire Internet, starting with Facebook.

Fascinating. What else will Match do with Facebook-tagged profiles? Usually you do something somewhere else and your actions show up on your wall. How will your Facebook and Match actions interact and to what benefit?

Match recently updated their Terms of Service. I don’t know what changed (send me a copy of a recent Match TOS if you have one) but the following gives Match carte blanche to use your profile and photos any way it pleases. I think all changes to privacy policy and TOS should be highlighted, but hardly everyone does this. Just take my info and get me to Farmville.

By posting Content to any public area of Match.com, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Match.com, its affiliates, licensees and successors, an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, reproduce, adapt, modify and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sub-licenses of the foregoing. You further represent and warrant that public posting and use of your content by Match.com will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party.

One could theoretically create a Facebook app that just like any Facebook app, asks for permission to read certain data, enabling the harvesting of minimal information from potentially millions of Match profiles. I say potentially because I don’t see the Facebook object markup on any other Match site that I checked. I’ve spent enough time diving into the Facebook Social Graph to know that there are a lot of interesting ways to retrieve and manipulate data, and thats just the public Facebook API’s. One wonders what third-party developers could do with this information.

Ok, enough speculation. I need to ponder this some more. Regardless of Match’s intentions in regards to Facebook integration, its a great mental exercise to brainstorm the possibilities.

Hoping you will share your thoughts on the subject.

No related posts.

Match.com To Offer Sex Offender Screening

David Evans — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:49:22 +0000

Big news in the world of online dating. Match.com has announced it would begin running members through a sex offender registry. The story began to unfold just over a week ago, around the time I interviewed the rape victim, then called Jane Doe, who was attacked by a sexual predator on Match.com. Today, Jane Doe announced she was Carole Markin on Good Morning America and the Today Show.

Last week Markin went on the record saying she was was threatening Match with legal action to force the worlds largest dating site to offer background checks.

I’ve always though that the dating industry needed to do more to keep its members safe, but I didn’t expect events to unfold so quickly. After all, the dating industry has been talking about/avoiding the topic of online safety for many years.

It turns out that Markin’s publicity efforts have indeed turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. Her decisive efforts to bring online dating safety to the public eye were effective to a degree that surprised everyone.

But let’s not just look at Match. I’ve always said that five sites make the dating industry, 25 matter and the rest are smaller players targeting mostly interest and geographic niche markets. Worldwide, there are thousands of dating sites, some subscription-base, many free. The implications of the Match situation are reverberating throughout the rest of the industry and it will take some time to see how it reacts.

The safety category on this blog has many articles about online dating safety. You can get a real sense of how the dating industry has not wanted to address the issue head-on from a business standpoint. Of course the industry doesn’t want people harmed, but the business case and legal issues surrounding the issues have made it difficult to find a solution that works for everyone.

We have talked a lot about background checks like Rely ID at eHarmony, ID verification like Tru.ly that could be used on multiple sites, (Facebook LinkedIn, Angies List, Craigslist, etc). Running members through a sex offender screening process would most likely work behind the scenes. There would be no “verified member” badge and the problem of some people have the badge and other not and the ensuing customer service issues would be avoided. My problem is that the background check would only be valid on Match.com.

That’s why I like Tru.ly, which has created a persistent, portable identity credential that can be used on many websites. Its doesn’t offer background checks yet, but the service just launched and will evolve to offer other safety and even marketing-based features. This is very exciting to me, as I have worked with many identity providers over the years and its nice to see a company that Gets It.

Will Match’s efforts at making online dating safer be adopted by other dating sites? If Match is perceived as safer than other dating sites, that could have a huge impact on the rest of the industry. I for one think that background checks will be used as a powerful marketing tool. Why join a sketchy dating site when you can belong to Match and at least know they are making an effort to keep their members safer?

The media is jumping on the story big-time, Google news has scores of stories and television stations are scheduling lots of interviews.

Consumerist says:

In news that could set a precedent for online dating sites, Match.com announced over the weekend that it plans to begin screening users to see if they have a history of being sex offenders.

In the Wall Street Journal, Match mentions concerns over reliability factors of background check data. These concerns are right on the money. Background check companies will deny this, but these are the same companies than malign their competitors by saying their data isn’t fresh or offer nationwide coverage.

Interesting that Match responded by saying it was already planning on offering background checks in the next few months. How convenient.

Quote from Match:

We’ve been advised that a combination of improved technology and an improved database now enables a sufficient degree of accuracy to move forward with this initiative, despite its continued imperfection.

Competitors like eHarmony and True.com have offered background checks for many years and Match is blaming database technology as the reason they have been dragged their heels. Does that mean that a technology vendor is really to blame for the lack of safety checks at Match?

Of course not, but blaming technology, a good excuse for the general public, won’t fly around the industry.

An important point to consider is that Match is saying they will run members through a sex offender database. This is different from the usual talk about background checks and identity verification, which are usually opt-in scenarios with their own set of issues.

In some accounts, Match has expressed concerns about the validity of the data used to check up on members. This is an entirely valid issue. Background check vendors are always throwing each other under the bus with statements about each other’s data-sources. Last time I checked, no one company had have blanket coverage across the entire United States. Hopefully some background check data providers will chime in about the coverage issue. Match is rightfully concerned that singles, thinking everyone on a dating site is A Good Person, will be lulled into a false sense of security.

Even Carole Markin knows she could have been more careful on her date. Background checks are not a panacea for dating safety. Singles must remain vigilant, use their heads and trust their guts, regardless of the what a site may or may not do to keep them safe.

Several dating industry executives have written to voice concern about running members through offender databases. A few themes have arisen, such as how do you screen non-paying members? Will Match will only screen paid members, which is about 1.5 million out of 20 million profiles. And how will trial account be screened if only email address and username are collected?

Screens won’t be fool-proof. You could use a friend’s card to pay, or a stolen one. If only a small subset (those who subscribe) are screened, then you have possible confusion and a false sense of security.

One big questions is whether the Match solution will increase monthly subscription fees.

It will be interesting to see how the rest of the online dating industry responds.

We’ll have a lot more to say about online dating safety in coming days as the story continues to unfold. What do you think about Match offering background checks? Leave a comment.

No related posts.

Tru.ly Identity Verification For Dating Sites

David Evans — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 01:25:26 +0000

In Identity and Reputation as (Social)Currency I mentioned Dave Gordon’s startup, Tru.ly. The following is taken from numerous conversations with Dave in recent months and the tru.ly website.

The idea of verification on dating sites has been met with much trepidation by the community however there is an outcry from users for some sort of verification product that is not going to overwhelm or scare people from using it.

Tru.ly is offers an integration with dating sites that is easy to implement as a value add to the user. The Tru.ly solution takes away the notion of scary background checks and should be thought of as a profile enhancer, a way for the user to make themselves stand out among a sea of others.

600 million people on Facebook and Skype using their real names and you’re going to tell me that identity verification and its offshoots aren’t going to be big business? Please. You have to think social and work your way back to dating. Of course the two use-cases are different. But in the past it seems like companies didn’t get this. They sure do know.

Tru.ly simply verifies the information in a persons profile as accurate. The partner site is able to choose what information they want to validate, while keeping the users name anonymous. Attributes like age, sex and location are things that can be verified via the Tru.ly API. But this is only the beginning. I can’t go into detail, but as someone who has thought about identity for many years, there are so many added-value and revenue generation opportunities, well it’s ridiculous. Just considering Facebook credits as a virtual currency and tie that into the requirements for identity verification, I digress but holy cow that is going to make PayPal look like your local cooperative bank.

Dating sites, games, social networks, all these have some sort of reputation-based features. Getting your identity verified is the initial step that opens up a whole world of possibility. But everyone focuses on the background check or the identity verification process itself like its a set-it-and-forget-it situation. I say give them away, the money is in the follow-on services. Fine maybe that doesn’t work with RelyID at eHarmony, but thats only a couple hundred thousand people, a drop in the bucket so to speak.

As a profile enhancer , the Tru.ly API can be used for free, sites can also charge a monthly fee for keeping a users information verified. Tru.ly will allow sites to generate significant revenue if marketed appropriately (dating sites need some marketing help when it comes to identity verification services. Call me.).

Dave says that after spending considerable time talking with members of the dating site community it has seemed like “oh no not another one of these.” From what I’ve seen, Tru.ly is truly different (ouch).

The company is in the business of building the pipeline for online verified communication, across multiple industries. They have a product and want you to give dating site users a product that is both compelling and trustworthy, one that enhances your brand image and is able to make you money.

Step one: get them verified.

Step two: embed credential-based search filtering.

Step three: monetize the credential. Tru.ly says they won’t sell your data, but if it leads to better dates, deals and cheaper vacations, take me I’m yours. This is where the product development and marketing teams should be salivating. Not as much data as from Facebook Connect, but how long do you think until Tru.ly works with Facebook Connect? Then you are on Facebook and a dating site, verified, and companies and start pushing out functionality that drives higher interaction with their site, between people (remember, communication is a key part of the puzzle here) and beyond – think freemium features, VIP, enhanced profiles, and that time in the future when dating sites actually partner with search companies that can weed out the creepers and the inappropriate matches.

Dating sites will ignore all of this their peril. Things are changing fast and consumers are getting savvier faster than you are evolving.

Identity verification is exciting stuff: people want it, it makes companies money, and it leads to bigger and better things all around, including safer dating. Most dating co’s will probably look back at the historical impact of verification and not the forward-thinking opportunity. Hoping that is not the case.

Tru.ly is going to crush it in the social space anyways, I just wanted to get them out in front on your radar because they are great folks with a solid product that you should at least take a call with.

Read Tru.ly for dating sites for more information.

No related posts.

Identity and Reputation as (Social)Currency

David Evans — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 00:14:40 +0000

This week I met up with Shawn Broderick. Shawn and I met for a burrito a few years ago when he was launching TrustPlus. Since then he went on to run Tech Stars Boston. Tech Stars accepts a handful of startups every year, providing $18,000 in seed funding and an incredible amount of assistance and mentoring. Shawn left Tech Stars last year. Interestingly, Katie Rae is the Managing Director of the Boston program now. Katie used to work at Meetcha.

Then I learned about WeGoLook.com, which claims to help Avoid Online Dating Scams and Misrepresentation. WeGoLook.com is an online service that dispatches a real person (background check verified) to the location of the online dating match in order to check their ID, take current photos and video beginning at only $49 anywhere in the US. Obvious fit for Craigslist and eBay, wondering how singles would react to the service and the price point.

After that, I heard from Dave Gordon, who’s Tru.ly identity verification service launched a new home page. I’ll post about them soon. Suffice to say, that Tru.ly understands to the core what Trufina, Backgroundchecks, Honesty Online and all of the others failed to miss when it comes to identifying online daters. It looks very similar to its counterparts, but I’ve spoken at length with Dave and this is just the beginning.

But wait, things get even more interesting. Venessa Miemis writes in The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity, Reputation:

Every time you upload a photo, make a comment, add a friend, click a link, or make a purchase, that data is being harvested to create a map and a simulation of you….By analyzing even slices of this data, a wealth of information can be extracted and predicted about you. As a related example, Google vice-president Marissa Meyer was said to have claimed at this year’s SXSW festival that credit card companies can look at spending habits and predict with 98% accuracy, two years in advance, when a couple is going to divorce.

If the trend continues where logging in via your Facebook profile is the simple method for verification, some speculate this could lead to Facebook evolving to being an actual utility for identity.

Absolutely. What a fantastic article, which goes on to talk about reputation as currency, mentioning Klout and PeerIndex, which are social versions of akin to Don’t Date Him Girl and Date Raters and all the rest of the sites that attempt to provide off-site feedback about online singles. But much more comprehensive and useful; no bitch sessions about a jerk guy you went on a date, just machines parsing your social output and assigning you a score. I’ve been talking about Klout for dating sites for five years, and yet all I hear is crickets.

Klout takes your twitter feed and gives you a ranking from 1-100. They will surly add in other datastreams in the future. My personal twitter Klout is 27. @datinginsider is 33. I have work to do.

Venessa also works on The Future of Facebook Project, which is absolutely fascinating, just look who is involved.

Dating sites are going to have to step it up and embrace startups who are charging ahead with innovative social tools that rank, rate and bring people together. For every dollar that gets invested in dating sites a million seems to go to the next new hot social startup.

The dating industry is absolutely horrible at anything even resembling a partnership. It’s not wonder that the entrepreneurs are going social these days. Thats where the action and the innovation and the funding is. I wish this was not the case.

To make matters worse, at some point singles are going to get sick of the online dating status quo. In fact, the noise on the web about “going back to the bars” is louder than ever. While in no way representative of the entire industry, look at these stats. Granted seasonal and ad-spend influences color these graphs, but still, when you look at industry stats across the board, something is going on and its not good.

No related posts.

Online Dating Safety in The Spotlight

David Evans — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:00:08 +0000

New York Times says New Online-Date Detectives Can Unmask Mr. or Ms. Wrong. There are hundreds of background check companies that offer services directly to singles. They all think they can make money in the dating market. Truth is, except for one or two companies with direct dating site partnerships, dating sites for the most part don’t want to offer background checks and these third-party solutions are going to require huge online marketing budgets to get the attention of singles.

The only way these background check services are going to be baked into dating sites directly is if the government forces them to. This isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

However, some dating site slooooowly appear to be warming up to the idea of identity verification, which has its own set of thorny issues in terms of how people react to search results with some people being verified and others not. At some point do I lose out if I’m not verified? Why do I have to pay more just to be on even ground with everyone else? And how will free sites deal with this? A freemium upgrade or avoid them entirely? And how the heck do you ask someone to get verified? Talk about awkward. (There are actually some neat ways to go about enticing people to sign up for these services.)

While I applaude dating sites taking some initiative to help make singles safer, a working solution that sites and singles can both be comfortable with is a long way off. The reality of the situation is that common sense is 1000 times more effective than any system dating sites put in place voluntarily or at the behest of the government.

No related posts.

Can The Semantic Web Save Online Dating?

David Evans — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 00:09:18 +0000

Online Personals Watch has published what I consider the most interesting interview I’ve ever read on that particular blog. Read what David Siegel has to say about starting a dating site based on the semantic web.

First, I recommend pointing your browser at the Semantic Web Wikipedia entry to wrap your brain around the concept.

As someone who started following the topic of a semantic web since going to a few MIT meetings in 2002, I thoroughly enjoyed the article. In fact, I wrote Semantic Web meets online dating in July of 2004. Match.com gets members tagging is relevant as well. Also see ProfileLinker Offers Portable Profiles, Online Dating in 2012 (circa 2007) and this blogs innovation category for more.

Much like when I was deep into virtual reality in the early 90′s, online dating is a fascinating confluence of many different remarkable people, ideas, business models and influences. I just love it when people tie themes of Internet search, technology platforms, emerging trends and the like to online dating.

David’s concept of One Single Profile is a great idea, one I’ve written about countless times from various perspectives over the years, from the dating as well as identity standpoint (see above links).

Lots of insider baseball terminology, but don’t let it scare you. Interesting to the semantic web discussed in the context of dating sites. I tried not to use the phrase so as to not scare people off, maybe if enough people grok the concept, some intrepid entrepreneurs will take it upon themselves to bake semantic/cloud/identity features into a new breed of dating sites as David plans to do.

Of all the things one could accomplish with Semantic Web technology, interesting that a well-known business guru is talking about creating a dating site. That’s at least $10 million to get going right there. If you’re going to change the game, you have to go big. Really big.

Organizing all the data on the Internet from the bottom-up? Never gonna happen. It’s going to be a top-down situation, where Goog and FB and others structure the data and make it accessible to new classes of web services which take advantage of Semantic Web. We’re building the majority of our websites with HTML4, which is from the late 1990′s, for crying out loud.

Problem with all of this is that consumers like anonymity and they don’t always trust their personal data in the cloud, regardless of how secure it may be. Forward movement is being made though. Check out a new open source project called Grendel that makes it easy for web apps to encrypt data using the user’s login password, and only decrypt that data when the user is logged in. Lots of variations on this theme are emerging, although getting sites to implement these concepts is going to take a long time. (See OpenID and Facebook Connect).

This statement gave me pause, “if I’m on eHarmony, I ought to be able to move my dating profile to another dating site or to my personal data locker and then manage it from there.” David, I think you need my “expectation alignment” sermon in regards to the dating industry. I’m certainly not holding my breath for an “export” button on a paid subscription site. Fix the damn matching algorithm first, priorities, please.

Interesting to see David switch talk about how identity fits into the big picture (Identity Gang, Higgins and a whole lot of other stuff I won’t go into here.) I used to go to these steering group meetings years ago. If you want to learn about identity, a good place to start is Identity Commons.

Funny how the title of David’s new book contains the word Pull, yet he advocates dating matches being pushed without having to log into a specific dating site. Semantics, ha. But he’s right about that and the whole dashboard concept. Another thing I’ve mentioned about a million times here.

I’ve always said there should be a single repository of profiles, and a vibrant ecosystem of vendors building search, safety and dynamic profile services. Problem is, everyone yells about how great niche sites are. Niche sites are only any good because they are the only alternative to big-box retailer dating sites.

Once you have a Semantic Web-based dating site (whatever that is going to look like), you can create niche sites on the fly, in real-time. Oh and by the way, these next-generation dating sites are not going to rely on Google and Bing and Yahoo and ad networks to drive users. Wednesdays Google presentation on Adwords at iDate is going to be a quaint relic in a few years. this is good because hopefully it will reduce new member acquisition costs, hurray.

Think about the Twitter and Facebook ecosystem, which while tiny in terms of overall revenue, is the direction things appear to be heading. Utility player creates the technology, marketing hype, partner ecosystem and all the rest of the underpinnings and other companies create the services that operate on the datastream.

I think my imaginary matching algorithm is better than anything Fernando can cook up (see comments on original post). I say, great! Throw it out there and let the people choose one or the other due to it being more effective, or fun or cheaper (incremental introduction billing and communication channels).

David mentions FOAF, which is tired metadata standard from many years ago, but he’s got the right idea. I’ve had my FOAF file on this blog for seven years.

A semantic web-base dating site is truly a blue ocean strategy at work, but this change-resistant industry won’t play by the new rules, it’s going to be people like David Siegel who push things forward. And Thread and its variants, and Gelato, and on and on.

Can a business expert, author and big-thinker actually launch a successful dating site based on the properties of the Semantic Web? It sure is going to be fun to watch. Even if he fails, the cat will be out of the bag, so to speak, and we’re never turning back.

I could talk about this for hours on end. Insightful post, thanks to OPW for interviewing David. Want more? Read David’s book, Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business. Then, contact me and let’s start challenging the status quo.

No related posts.

Augmented Identity App Great For Stalking, Death of Business Cards Imminent

David Evans — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:19:38 +0000

Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe has created a mobile application called Recognizr, a facial recognition service based on a mashup of face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality.

Point your phone at someone’s face and Recognizr’s face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person’s face and uploads it to a server where it’s matched with an identity in the database. The application then displays the subject’s name and links to their social persona such as photo sharing sites and social networks. More at PopSci.

Doesn’t work on iPhone, and I need to dig into the privacy concerns, of which I am sure of two things: 1) this will freak people out to no end, and 2) The Tribe has most likely identified most if not all of the issues people have with this sort of application. Time to break out the Richard Nixon masks!

I use the Yelp Monocle all the time. It turns on my iPhone camera and as I spin around floating windows appear on the screen overlaid on the live video. I’ve found It’s a great way to find beer, pizza and tourist destinations.

I’ve also been using Bump, which is a cool iPhone app where you bump fists with someone and your business card, photos or other items are immediately transferred to the other person’s phone. DUBMeNow is nowhere near as cool as Bump, but it’s profitable and raised $2.8 million recently.

Augmented reality is just getting started, things are going to get Minority Report/CSI very quickly, especially with the iPad.