How We Did It: Catherine Cook and Geoff Cook, founders of myYearbook.

Social Discovery app Ntro launched months ago, backed By $1.7 million in funding, via TechCrunch. Other similar apps have been pulled from the marketplace, yet Ntro raises $1.7 million. Have you heard of or used this app?

Here Are Almost All Of The Possible Reasons Why You Were Dumped, In A Drop-Down Menu  via Forbes.

The Top Questions Asked At A Y Combinator Interview. Startup founders should be very familiar with most, if not all of these. If you can’t answer these, you probably shouldn’t be running a dating site, or any business for that matter.

Insights in Human Knowledge, From the Minds of Babies. Nothing to do with dating, but I love hearing researchers talk about their work and someday maybe someone in a dating lab somewhere will have an egads! moment and figure out how to match people more efficiently and effectively than what we have today.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry News 8-1-11
2. Online Dating Industry News 9-12-11
3. Online Dating Industry News 2-9-12

I love love love HowAboutWe’s Flash Contest from March (lag, I know!). No question, the HowAboutWe marketing department runs circles around the rest of the online dating industry and their goofy 20-something’s blog is pretty awesome (says the older guy who doesn’t get 1/2 of what they post there but hey it seems like the kids love it.)

The contest was to promote the launch of HowAboutWe Couples, which I guess is couples suggesting date ideas to each other over the interweb, with some sponsored date ideas or something. Hasn’t launched yet so who knows.

Google Updates its search index every few months with names like Panda or Caffeine, which changes just like Android release names: Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, etc. Match branded their algorithm Synapse (great Slate article). Very snappy, sounds like great name for an electric car. I haven’t seen any indications of the Google Dance when Match updates its algorithm, have you?

Check out Match’s mobile app loading screen. Each of these photos should be a link to their profile, and I would pay big bucks to be featured on it for a day in my area code. Instead of 75 little photos, just have a gallery of 10 or so and sell the space to members. Badoo makes $150 million a year doing this, it does work. Yes its a loading screen, masking a lot of things going on in the background and being downloaded to your phone. Instagram is masterful at how they mask whats going on behind the scenes, which is why the app seems so responsive. Their presentation on designing for mobile is a must-read.

POF is getting serious about their Freemium offer. 530% increase in the chance that someone will respond to me? I’ll take it.

Then I see that OKCupid says that their Test results are up to 1594% accurate. Thats almost 2,345.67% more accurate than POF. That OkCupid Staff Robot is hilarious. Almost as funny as the Freddie the Mailchimp monkey.

Oh SNAP!

SNAP Interactive, makers of Are You Interested, says revenue increased for the 12th consecutive quarter.

• Quarterly revenue increased 54 percent to $5.7 million compared to $3.7 million for the comparable period in 2011;
• Net loss for the quarter increased to $1.7 million compared to a net loss of $0.9 million for the comparable period in 2011;
• Deferred revenue increased 9 percent to $3.4 million at March 31, 2012 compared to $3.1 million at December 31, 2011;
• Diluted loss per share for the quarter was $0.04 compared to a loss of $0.02 for the comparable period in 2011; and
• SNAP’s balance sheet position continues to be strong, with $7.4 million of available sources of liquidity (includes cash and cash equivalents plus investments) at March 31, 2012.

Product Highlights for Q1 2012

• Added 3.8 million new profiles to the AreYouInterested.com brand;
• The AreYouInterested.com iPhone application was downloaded approximately 750,000 times from the iPhone App Store;
• Increased mobile engagement to 15% of all unique logins during March 2012 from 13% in December 2011; and
• During March 2012, we averaged over 550,000 daily sessions or visits to our mobile AreYouInterested.com platform (including iPhone, mobile web, and Android sessions)

More at Dailymarkets.

Here’s an in-depth article about Skout, which recently raised a whopping $22 million for their  growing mobile social app.

Fab, the failed gay social network that pivoted to online shopping, is launching its third iteration, improving upon social shopping. This is the best “We failed at a relationship site but lets try something else” story I’ve ever heard. Big success, big revenue, an all around win. More at VentureBeat.

Zoosk has more than 50m users in more than 60 countries. The service is available in 20 languages. Social-dating site Zoosk makes jump from retail colo to wholesale, moving to a turn-key wholesale data center solution in San Jose operated by Fortune. A year ago, Spark Networks filed a lawsuit against Zoosk, OKCupid and other dating sites. What ever happened with that? I have a big piece of Zoosk in the hopper, will launch that next week, heading to Boston for a few days.

TechCrunch says Cheek’d is online dating in reverse.

Use your LoveID code number to SMS, call or email people. You have total control and can block anyone at the click of a button or SMS. None of your regular contact details will be passed on. You decide when to share your more intimate details.

Love this Andrew Chen article about him doubting Facebook could build a billion dollar business. Reminded me a lot of the dating companies I come across every day. Ninety-eight point zero five percent of them will never go anywhere, so how do you identify the outliers that will pop and go big time? Is it features? Rarely. People argue with me all the time that their features are what differentiate them from their competitors.

The value of a dating site is the people on the site. Either they are your people (relevant to you in some way), or they aren’t. Doesn’t matter how good your matching algorithm is if its not using a base of your people to begin with.

People on eHarmony are generally not a good fit for Match people. OkCupid people are not likely to date POF people. Datehookup people and Mate1 people are probably not going to meet up with HowAboutWe people.

Little else matters except a matching system that surfaces a handfull of likely candidates every day. And now we have any number of mobile, social dating, friends matching friends, verified people type sites launching. If 25 sites launch that justify their existence on low customer acquisition costs based on spamming your Facebook friends, only a few are going to make it, the rest will run out of cash too soon. So how do we identify the few companies that are going to make it? This is exactly what Andrew talks about in his blog post. The winners exhibit certain non-typical attributes, which are incredibly difficult to suss out, but doing so is part of the fun. Thats why I talk to at least 10 dating startups every week.

Every once in a while companies will send me samples of their products. I am contractually obligated to tell you that as someone who demands high performance products to enhance their love life, Astroglide Personal Lubricants such as Astroglide X enhance the comfort and ease of all of my intimate physical activities.

There are several social dating startups that my spider-sense tells me have something going for them worth talking about, so thats what I’ll be doing next week.

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry News 8-10-11
2. Online Dating Industry News 5-27-11
3. Online Dating Industry News 6-19-2011

I’m psyched about my 1.5 million Facebook shares, which is going to make me filthy rich. I’m planning on dumping them this afternoon, moving to the tropics and becoming a banana farmer. I kid, I kid, but can you imagine how the new crop of multi-millionaires and billionaires feels right now? Minutes away from changing their lives forever, amazing and somewhat depressing (looks down at drawer full of 20 years of startup options that never vested).

Got this from Match and Chemistry.com. This was not how I expected to start my day:

Dear David Evans:

We regret to inform you that you have been removed from the Match.com Affiliate Program. Removal may occur for a variety of reasons, including violation of copyright/search policies, failure to comply with legal terms, inactivity of your account, or changes in content site.

Thankfully, I have my 1.5 million Facebook shares to fall back on.

Global Personals acquires Smooch.com. Deal includes the WooWise white label system and Mancentral.com, which will help Global Personals grow its gay dating division through own-brand and partner sites. Martin Bysh and Marcus Hamilton will remain as advisors to the business. Looking into the deal, Bysh said in an interview at one point that he spent $400,000 before Smooch.com was even operationally profitable.

Global Personals is crushing it in the white label dating space. Revenue is way up and these type of acquisitions are only going to help. I think the company will be doing $100 million in revenue sooner rather than later if they keep this up.

Dating Factory is making big changes as well. New mobile initiatives like mobile vs. web surfers reporting, mobile landing pages customization and new updated web interfaces with adaptive technologies are in the works.

Not to be left out of the white label market, Badoo has entered into an agreement with HotOrNot to power their service. From TechCrunch: This deal signals another direction for Badoo’s growth: as a backbone, B2B provider for other social networks. Other sites that also use Badoo’s service like this include icq.com (for a short time), gentemessenger.com and clubnx.com.

But wait, there’s more white label dating news.

New Scientist Connect gives you the chance to meet like-minded people who share similar interests to you – whether you’re looking for love, or just to meet someone on the same wavelength, no matter where you are in the world. (Ha, wavelength, get it?)

Operated for New Scientist by The Dating Lab, which also offers white label services to a number of dating sites, publishers and brands.

Spotify jumps into dating game with two new musical matchmaking apps. Tastebuds, which I’ve mentioned before, and Fellody feature different approaches with the goal of helping users connect with new friends and potential dates based on favorite artists, most-listened-to music, and their Spotify playlists. More at HuffPo.

Online Dating Enters the iPad Age.

True.com launches free dating site, SinglesBee. It seems that having a really ugly-looking website is a prerequisite for free dating sites. And what is it with subscription-based sites launching free dating sites? They make a lot of money people charging people 20 bucks a month, and now everyone is so scared of sites like POF that they think they can build up enough of an audience to earn lots of revenue off of advertising? #probablynot.

Facebook dating app: TradingSingles. The app allows users to select their single friends to be “traded in” for matches in their area.

DuoDater makes online dating social with double dates, tips hat to StepOut (Ignighter). Speaking of Step Out, a recent email I received from the service led me to my inbox there, which was literally 100% spam. Huge in India, StepOut in the US, not so much.

According to a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 37% Of U.S. Teens Now Use Video Chat, 27% Upload Videos.

You Will. The Law of Shitty Clickthroughs via the amazing Andrew Chen. Check the AT&T ad at the top of the article. Back in the day I was working for the firm that created the ad and ran it on Hotwired. It  was exciting as hell to be uploading the first paid banner ads on the Internet, and watching them enjoy a  78% click-through rate, as compared to today’s sub-0.05% on Facebook.

While OKCupid continues to remove popular features, they’re adding new ones as well. New OkCupid A-List Features: See who rated you highly and anonymous browsing.

POF passes 100M weekly messages, 2 Billion Pageviews/Week, via Plenty of fish blog. #jawdrops. POF is also the top dating site in Brazil now. Visits to dating sites in Brazil have jumped 58 percent from this time last year. #hellountappedmarket.

Dating startup Cafe4tune launches Android app In Google Play store, combines standard or 3D social network interaction with secure online dating. In 2006 I wrote up a business plan for a client pretty much exactly describing Cafe4tune.

DateOften launches interests-based mobile social dating app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Do we really need yet another one?

DateMyFamily is the first free family oriented dating site, encourages active family involvement in the dating process. Kind of a creepy name, no?

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry News January 6, 2012
2. Online Dating Industry News 2-9-12
3. Dating Industry News November 12, 2012

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

Big news, social discovery/dating site Badoo is on track to hit 150 million users today. Corporate communications at Badoo told me that they attribute the 150,000 daily new users in part to mobile and US growth, specifically. Thirty-five million active users per month worldwide is incredible, to say the least.

I spent 30 days straight on Badoo a few months ago and have spoken at length with executives about the company’s past as well as its future plans. I even wrote a position paper on Badoo for a top 10 dating site, which was smart enough to see the writing on the wall in terms of social discovery and the opportunities and challenges it brings to traditional dating sites.

Looking at Badoo, I can’t help but feel the same as when I started tracking Skout, Zoosk and Are You Interested back in the day. All three have grown to be mature businesses that have come to define the mobile social dating and discovery sector. Of course there are others like MyYearbook, which has been a strong presence in to social space for years.

With social discover being such a hot topic and investor money pouring into the space, expect a whole new crop of similarly-focused sites and apps to proliferate over the next few months as everyone chases after the “We’re tired of Facebook, I want to meet and/or date new people” market.

Its been a blast watching this sector grow over the past few years, and while none of these sites are for serious daters, they certainly know how to go after the casual market. Recently, Zoosk saw the writing on the wall, and has been doing some rebranding to try to appear more social in nature. It remains to be seen how thats worked out for them.

I’m surprised that POF didn’t go after the paid exposure market. that would have been a great fit for them. Maybe POF is making big bank on their daily deals site and decided to stick with that strategy, we’ll see.

Some quotes from Tech Crunch about Badoo:

• Mobile usage has grown by 100% since November 2011
• More than doubling mobile revenues
• U.S. growth is also being powered by mobile
• Android app is now one of the top 10 most popular apps (No. 7) for social networking
• iPhone app is now a top 25 social networking app, up from No. 60 late last year

Impressive. Badoo had a fun US launch in New York City a while back, and is seeing US growth primarily centered in Miami, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston.

While 150 million users is no small feat, in order to really make an impact in the US, Badoo has to do some serious refactoring of their interface and add some features. There’s simply not much to do on the site and its easy to use it for a few weeks and they bail, although in other countries the site has proven to engage members for quite some time.

A TechCrunch commeter mentioned that the 150 million users number might have been inflated due to Badoo acquiring HotOrNot, good point.

Badoo makes around $1 per user, which is low, but with 150 million people,  they are hard at work figuring out ways to further monetize users, just like Facebook. I wonder where Badoo will top out at? 200 million users? If they could get the “Tired of Facebook” people, that number could be much larger.

Yes, Tagged is at something like 300 million users, but honestly I haven’t been on the site in years and don’t pay attention to it.

Who owns the patents for this social discovery stuff? I bet they are just sitting back waiting for the marketplace to reach a certain level and then start trolling for dollars. That’s going to be fun to watch.

Here’s some backstory on Badoo from WIRED.

Related posts:

1. Badoo Want To Run A $100 Billion Company
2. Send In The Badoo Clones
3. Facebook Growing By 600k Users A Day

Several years ago I met Christian and (at the time) Redg at Skout, think it was iDate. After talking to them a while I wanted to help them out with fundraising, so I went to the usual suspects and sat in on some investor meetings on Skout’s behalf. Nobody was interested, most investors (that I know anyway), were either already invested in mobile apps, or sitting back and cooling their heels to see how things in the location-based discovery/dating market panned out. Skout also had too many business models at the time, and the tons of young kids and spam turned some investors off completely.

What a difference a few years makes. Skout has refocused the app on a new demographic: young people who wanted to meet strangers and singles who wanted to flirt.

Skout was popular enough early on to take advantage of much cheaper customer acquisition costs, and is currently singing up one million new members each month.

In a story on TechCrunch, its mentioned that Skout has a healthy revenue stream from in-app purchases. Users can pay for points to send virtual gifts, see who is viewing their profile and send wink bombs.

Skout co-founder Christian Wiklund says they have cleaned up the service, removing 40,000 devices a month to keep existing members happy and spam-free.

To keep the engine going, Skout is raising $22 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Thats Marc Andreessen, the guy who invented the web browser, and who also invested in Foursquare and many other huge Internet startups.

With the funding, Skout plans to find a new office that will hold 120 people and focus on scaling the service.

I love it when capable entrepreneurs keep chipping away at an idea over time, making mistakes, learning from them, pivoting when required, and having the tenacity to round up a huge pile of cash from A-list investors. Huge win for Skout, and the entire dating industry should benefit as investors continue to warm up to casual, social, mobile, location-based dating apps.

Note that HowAboutWe raised $15 million last year. What did Skout say to investors to get such a big investment? Probably the fact that Skout is much larger than HAW and its often easier to ask people for money with in-app purchasing than it is subscriptions, just ask Badoo.

Looks like paying for credit-based features on dating sites is back with a vengeance after networks like Spring Street abandoned the practice years ago.

Badoo has tons of money in the bank and now Skout steps up to the plate. The battle for the casual dating is on, although I think Badoo will take the 30 and up crowd and Skout will split up the youngsters with a handful of other apps. Who else is doing casual dating at this scale?

Related posts:

1. WhosHere Raises $1.25M For Location-Based Social Networking
2. Friendster Raises Additional $10 Million
3. Skout Launches iPhone Application

Mobile applications that track and make your current location public have proliferated in recent years. Almost all of these efforts have been tied into public Foursquare, and now Facebook, checkins. My favorite has always been Assisted Serendipity, which I’ve written about many times. There are so may other social versions of these apps, I can’t even keep track of them. Today’s dust-up in the blogosphere is over Girls Around Me.

What makes Girls Around Me special? The fact that it connects Foursquare checkins with Facebook pages and a map, instead of a text list of locations where people are. A basic step in the natural evolution of Assisted Serendipity and 50 other social apps, Girls Around Me is the one that got the data providers to pay attention.

Stalking apps, ahem, I mean mobile social discovery apps, have two primary differentiators. They either use public data from sources like Foursquare or private in-app data, which for this discussion we will generally considere as opt-in tracking. As usual, the devil is in the privacy details of Facebook and Fourquare. Set your privacy setting up right, and most? of this information is public. Do it wrong and well you can insert your own Nightmare Situation here.

You know Grindr, the popular gay hookup app? Girls Around Me makes Grindr look positively antiquated, and all it took was a few API calls to Foursquare and Facebook (Although kudo’s for Grindr to take into consideration that not that the boys on Grindr want to be that public about their trysts).

Many other similar apps have been roaming in the wilderness for years, and all it took was a few blog posts to get mobile/social networks focused on the nefarious ways their data may be used. The truth of the matter is that people are brazen idiots when it comes to checking into locations on Facebook and Foursquare. I’m one myself. I like to brag that I’m at a great concert, or out to dinner at the hot new restaurant in town with an attractive woman.

Did you know there are websites that track Foursquare check-ins so people know to rob your house? Crazy!

I shudder to think about the number of women who are going to get in trouble due to the proliferation of opt-in and automated checkins in the coming years. I think its going to be a much bigger deal than people getting attacked on first dates.

More info at Interactioned and Cult Of Mac, which says Foursquare has released a statement announcing that they have officially killed Girls Around Me’s access to their public API. Facebook is looking into it as well. Well that was fast.

Related posts:

1. FourSquare, Meet Facebook
2. SingleSquare Dating on Top of Foursquare
3. Assisted Serendipity Blows The Doors Off Mobile Dating Apps

Marketdata Enterprises has updated their  US Dating Industry Study, bringing it up to date for 2012. We’ve arranged for Online Dating Insider readers to be able to order the report for $1,325, a 30% discount on the $1,895 list price. The same discount applies to specific chapters, which vary in price. The entire study weighs in at 280 Pages. Great for dating entrepreneurs looking to start a dating site, especially when paired with some of my advisory services.

Of particular interest is the chapter on Matchmakers, which a lot of people researching matchmakers have purchased in the past. Spend a couple hundred bucks before shelling out $10,000, its a no-brainer.

Curious? Check out the full Table of Contents.

Contact me if you’re interested in buying the study. I have some other incredibly useful reports as well, great for the aspiring dating entrepreneur.

Related posts:

1. U.S Dating Services Industry Market Study
2. Dating Services Industry Study price reduced
3. Online Dating Industry News January 6, 2012

Tonight on CNBC at 9PM EST. Love at First Byte. 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.

Maybe you’ll even get a glimpse of yours truly.

Grading the online dating industry:  Eli Finkel, Associate Professor of Social Psychology at Northwestern University, says that dating site matching systems are Doing It Wrong. Eli just called me and we’re going to have an in-depth talk next week, the highlights of which I’ll share here.

“To date, there is no compelling evidence that any online dating matching algorithm actually works,” Finkel observes. “If dating sites want to claim that their matching algorithm is scientifically valid, they need to adhere to the standards of science, which is something they have uniformly failed to do. In fact, our report concludes that it is unlikely that their algorithms can work, even in principle, given the limitations of the sorts of matching procedures that these sites use.”

“The authors suggest that the existing matching algorithms neglect the most important insights from the flourishing discipline of relationship science. The algorithms seek to predict long-term romantic compatibility from characteristics of the two partners before they meet. Yet the strongest predictors of relationship well-being, such as a couple’s interaction style and ability to navigate stressful circumstances, cannot be assessed with such data.”

According to Finkel, “developers of matching algorithms have tended to focus on the information that is easy for them to assess, like similarity in personality and attitudes, rather than the information that relationship science has found to be crucial for predicting long-term relationship well-being. As a result, these algorithms are unlikely to be effective.”

“Thus far, the industry certainly does not get an A for effort,” noted Finkel. “For years, the online dating industry has ignored actual relationship science in favor of unsubstantiated claims and buzzwords, like ‘matching algorithms,’ that merely sound scientific.”

Thanks to @dizzycatdesign for the tip.

The latest Online Dating Industry Insider is out on Scoop.it. Feel free to suggest stories and links.

Mobile Update

While niche apps like Grindr and other discovery apps may get all the press, Plentyoffish surpassed 300 million monthly visits to their free iPhone and Android apps in January 2012. Markus Frind, Founder of POF told me this week at 40 percent of sign-ups in the U.S. are now via mobile device. Can any other dating app come even remotely close to this?

Update: Markus just sent me this link. Is dating on the web dead, is it really moving to mobile like he says?

I have 15 dating apps on my phone, from POF to Badoo, Match and a bunch of little ones that look so sad sitting on my home screen, barely used. Even OKCupid’s mobile app, which I like, has never let me make a meaningful connection with a woman in my area. Believe me I’ve tried. Never once has a woman said, “Thanks for saying hi, yes I’m in your area, lets go get a cup of coffee.”

Maybe I’ll reinstall the POF mobile app and give that a try. Its getting near impossible to keep track of all the mobile apps and I know I’m missing some great ones.

As for Zoosk and Badoo and AYI and whatnot, the churn rate on these apps is so high, anyone worth meeting is only there for a few weeks and then poof they disappear. That is emotionally draining, at least to me.

I’ve spent a month on Badoo and MyYearbook. Logging in via mobile and web every single day. I’ll have more on that in a future post.

Mobile, its hard to attract users, even harder to monetize them and the location-based services rarely turn up anyone worth talking to. Someone please show me a new site that has awesome members who are engaged, intelligent and want to meet for a coffee.

AstrologyDating.com Officially Launches with the Introduction of Pay-Per-Match Online Dating.

Tastebuds, the dating site that matches singles using music, now has over 35,000 music fans. Love their blog,  Coldplay fans least likely to have sex on first date, ha.

More Christians Seeking Love Connection Online (video).

Niche site of the week: uTest Launches “QAdate.com” – World’s First Dating Site For Software Testers. Talk about the perfect way to design a dating site, lol!

Top 25 dating blogs.

Match has an infographic out about singles and politics. Infographics are all the rage now. The problem is that most are boring, don’t tell an interesting story, or as with Match’s, basically say one thing and the graphic says something else completely. Infographics are all about getting more links to your site. Throw up some questionable data, make it look pretty and hope for the best.

Speaking of Match, check out Meetics’s numbers. Dating industry growth hype, let yee be smited (or at least put into perspective) by the mighty 10-Q. I wonder who put that Singlesnet deal together at Match? That was a rare misstep that they are going to be paying for for a while.

Still, Match continues to crush it in terms of overall revenue and subscribers. Pretty soon they will be making $200 million a quarter!

Sure there are 50 new tiny sites making waves with press releases, but Match = Amazon and even if they have a bad quarter they are just going to buy up competition and keep growing.

Match will own Plentyofish within a few years, right?

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry News 8-1-11
2. Online Dating Industry News January 6, 2012
3. Online Dating Industry News 5-12-11

After a bummer of a sale to FriendFinder Networks, which has proven adept at killing off perfectly good acquisitions, Nerve.com has launched a new dating site.

Many people, myself included, consider Nerve/SpringStreet to have been the best “first wave” dating site. Anyone who knows me personally knows how much I like OkCupid and Match, which I tend to write about more than any other sites, but thats because they are doing more than any other sites! Lots of contenders to round out the top five of course, thats for another post.

Speaking of Nerve Personals/FastCupid, back in 2006 I learned that if you spend 100 points a day you become a featured member on search page or that if you spend 2000 points you get your profile highlighted for one month. Sounds like Badoo, right?

Look at eHarmony trying to be all hip and cool. This is what a brand expert would call brand dissonance.

According to Urban Dictionary, The Wingman will always be there to “occupy” least attractive girl of the pair so that you may engage in the “hotty”. If it didn’t say eHarmony, I would have guessed the ad was for HowAboutWe. No word if eHarmony also acts as a “pre-wing“.

Look at this Christian Mingle ad. Cute “Church Girls” that look like they just got out of Bible study class and decided to sit in each other’s laps for a while, how nice. Proves that Christian sites are no different from any other dating sites and will do whatever it takes for more clicks.

Students in The iSchool at Drexel, College of Information Science and Technology completed a study that takes a closer look at the success stories of online daters. Reminds me of the Online Booty Call claim from years ago, “Reaching the one million member mark with only a single reported marriage is a tremendous accomplishment.”

A summary of what they found:

1.       eHarmony – Success = marriage (in 84 percent of success stories reported on the site)

2.       Match.com – Success = dating (49.2 percent of success stories are about getting a date)

3.       OkCupid –  Success = something other than marriage (only 23 percent of success stories on this site are about marriage)

Moonit’s new Social iPhone App is free and offers valuable insights into your romantic relationships. Users can view their percentage compatibility and a short, entertaining paragraph of tangible advice on what to appreciate, what to look out for, and what to work on for that particular pairing.

After receiving their relationship compatibility results, users can continue the dialogue by chatting with each other using the messaging functionality right inside the app and make plans to meet up in person.

RedLightCenter.com, the world’s premier adult virtual world, and UtherConvention.com, the world’s only convention planning and execution company that holds fully interactive virtual conventions, announced they will join together to host the first-ever Adult Entertainment Virtual Convention on Feb. 25 and 26, 2012. Event organizers confirmed this week that Seka (talk about old-school!), the mega-porn star of the 1970s and 80s, will be speaking at the Expo.

Work at OkCupid: They have been growing rapidly, and their team needs the best and brightest to help solve some of the most challenging problems in the field. Want to join ’em?

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry News November 12, 2012
2. 2012 U.S. Dating Services Industry Study
3. Online Dating Industry News 9-12-11