Online Dating Insider » Software

BoonEx Releases Dolphin 7 Community Software

David Evans — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 13:58:45 +0000

BoonEx, a leader in the Community and Social Networking software market, has release Dolphin 7. Disclaimer: Boonex is an advertiser. Dolphin was developed on a modular system, and BoonEx claims it easy to install default modules, such as a 100% Ajax based forum, file sharing, instant and simple messengers, audio/video chat, mailbox, music and video players, video recorder, a user’s profile customizer and more, and further – to disable them or add other third party modules.

One thing I’ve always said about dating site or community software is that you’re basically buying an administration system. Serving up a profile is easy, it’s the pay-wall, user and communications management that’s complicated. Various forms of security and anti-fraud solutions can make up a large portion of a dating site codebase as well.

A lot of dating software in the past didn’t upgrade easily. Unless your developers were skillful and really knew the system well, the version of Dolphin you built you site on was the version it stayed. This is bad for two primary reasons, functionality and security. You can’t take advantage of new features and hackers can deface or take down your site. This is true for blogs as well, a Wordpress blog I host myself was recently hacked because I failed to install a single upgrade.

The ability to skin, or layer a specific design on Dolphin was a problem as well. If Dolphin is truly skinnable and modular, launching a site should require much less effort and expense. I’m going to throw a copy on a box and see how much the installation process and features have changed. Boonex Dolphin isn’t for everyone, but if you are looking for a customizable site-in-a-box, check out the Dolphin site and play around with the live demo. And don’t forget to let us know what you think.

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eMeeting Dating Software Update

David Evans — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 23:03:20 +0000

Ben Fox wrote in to say that eMeeting dating software version 9.18 has just been released with minor fixes and additional features, you can download the full version or upgrade patches via the customer area of our website at http://datingscripts.co.uk. Additional software templates are available for download. There is also a new eMeeting community forum where dating and community website owners can keep in touch.

eMeeting blog.

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Shake Or Date iPhone Dating Application

David Evans — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 16:43:29 +0000

I’m not sure how many people are going to shell out $4.99 to take polls and look at profiles that don’t contain photos.

This Valentineâ€™s Day Use the iPhone or the iPod Touch to Rate a Date, Fake a Date or Shake a Date with New â€˜Shake or Dateâ€™ Entertainment Application. â€˜Shake or Dateâ€™ Uses Real-Life Dating Stories to Entertain and Provoke Opinions about the Dating Games People Play.

Shake or Date is a new interactive polling entertainment application (www.margometro.com) that poses real-life dating scenarios designed to entice people to discuss and share opinions about their dating preferences. Groups can use the game as a social experience, while individuals can play the game for entertainment and to hone their dating preferences.

How’s this for in-depth reporting: I’m not sure what this does, how it works or why people would want to use Shake or Date. What I do know is that this should clearly be a free, ad-supported application.
I would, however, enjoy an iPhone app that I can shake to make people disappear.

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Bass, Boomers and Blogrolls

David Evans — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 15:30:09 +0000

It was a small fish, but it fought like a champion. Yesterday I talked to Psismic, they are releasing a bunch of new features this week. I like the idea of capturing your lifestream, but is it enough to get people to share their information at yet another site? Facebook Connect to the rescue, perhaps.

Chatted with Ignighter, which is out at TechStars, going live soon.

BoonexNerd.net features tips tricks and tutorials for Boonex Dolphin. Good resources.

The whole baby boomer dating media epidemic is a bunch of hype from dating sites like Match and eHarmony who are stuck in a rut and can’t grow in the US anymore.

New York Times says It’s the Software, Not You. I feel this way about all dating sites.

Singles, you’re going to love this.The uRadiate blog is great and the Daily Rave is not to be missed.

Apologies for the month-plus long radio silence. AbeVigodaCirca1977 and Dandelionâ€™s stay in Second Life proved a little longer than expected, but theyâ€™ve paid off their Linden dollar debts and kicked their flying habits, and once again are out and about trolling dating sites on your behalf.

Or maybe it’s just me, but I feel like they are writing directly to me, as opposed to the watered-down generic stuff we get from most dating sites, if they even contact you at all. uRadiate is for people who are offended by lowest-common-denominator writing for singles. Love it.

Dating Advice from Graphic Designers.

I found at least 50 dating sites wanting to be included in my blogroll. What these companies don’t seem to understand is that Google actually penalizes blogs with tons of links.

So many companies try to live and die by Google ads or organic search. Why not focus on the brand and a 1/2 decent dating site? Lot’s of traffic that doesn’t convert or leaves your site with zombie profiles (stale) don’t do anyone any good.

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Peer to Peer Dating Software

David Evans — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:25:27 +0000

I saw a press release about P2P dating software but am unable to locate the actual software. Let me know if you find a url that links to the actual software.

The old fashioned way of signing up for a internet dating website, putting your profile in with hundreds of others and paying a monthly fee for the privilege of searching that database of profiles is about to become totally obsolete. Dating Share, a phenomenal new P2P Dating Software is changing everything about how we handle romance using online dating sites.

Dating Share is a completely new way to handle online dating. You donâ€™t pay a monthly fee to use our website. Instead, you download a P2P (peer-to-peer) software product that puts you directly in touch with a whole community of singles looking for romance online. P2P is the same technology used for music downloads and file sharing so you know this is the most up-to-date technology the internet has to offer.

The idea of Peer-Peer dating clients has been around for a while, but never seems to catch on. There are many desktop P2P clients like LimeWire and Transmission that are reasonably straightforward to use, but I’m having a difficult time seeing the general public actually downloading the client, searching for people, and figuring out how to communicate.

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Century Media Social Networking Development

David Evans — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 18:23:23 +0000

Century Media is located in Boston. We have built social networking sites from scratch and provide the following services:

Website design and development
MySQL database development and management
PHP Scripting – username and password login – keyword searching
Setting up ecommerce on your website including automated credit card processing
Search Engine optimization – viral marketing and promotion.
Flash movies and banners

Product or Service : Website design, programming, promotion
Website Address : http://century-media.com

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Selecting the Right Dating Site Software

David Evans — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:29:48 +0000

Mark Brooks is starting a list of Dating Software and Services similar to my Tools & Services directory. At least that’s what I though until I looked at the date of the post, April 13, 2006. I thought it was from last week. My inability to read dates correctly, I couldn’t help but start writing responses to commenters, albeit one year later.

To get started: here are some of the issues I have with these types of lists.

Lot’s of systems get on there that shouldn’t be.
No technical due diligence is performed.
Most of the people who complain about the software are not programmers, so their angry lashing out is biased.
When it comes to dating site software, offshore developers aren’t going to save you a dime. In fact, they are going to cause you many more problems.
While I am about as virtual as you can get, I like to be able to be close enough to my developers that I can buy them a beer while we talk shop an well as be able to chew them out in person when they stray off course.
Someone on Mark’s list said that custom coding is the way to go. That was obviously written by a programmer.
Most every dating site in a box will not scale to millions of daily pageviews. Just ask the IT guys at Match, or Markus at Plenty Of Fish. Ask dating site developers about load balancers and watch their expression.

These are generalizations, mind you. There are some incredibly talented developers and businesspeople putting together dating site systems and hosted solutions. The problem is they are difficult to find, or expensive, or not customizable enough. No one solution is ever going to be perfect. You have to prepare to get the short end of the stick on a few things.

Be incredibly careful about working with vendors and developers outside of the US. This is a general statement that will upset many incredibly talented developers and companies, but after hearing people complain about non-US vendors for years, take heed when you’re paying someone in foreign currency to develop your dating site.

Hosted services. If you want a site that looks just like every other third-tier dating site out there, and shares the same questionable profiles with hundreds of other sites, go for it, and expect to give up 20-50% of your revenue for the privilege.

From what I’ve seen hosted white-label social networking sites are far better managed than dating sites. Better code, better service and less hassle overall. I’ve also never used a hosted dating site myself and never recommend them to a client unless they are a tiny niche site and know nothing about internet businesses and have money to throw around. That hardly ever happens. Perhaps SkaDate or Dolphin or World Dating Partners are exceptions to this rule.
If you are hot to trot about a cool niche site for dirt bike riders or left-handed volleyball players, go start a site at Ning.com. You’ll be up and running in a few hours and promoting the site in a few days.

Your site most likely won’t need to scale to millions of users, and if it does, so what? At that point you’ll have so much money you can rebuild while you grow, like Myspace did and Friendster didn’t.

Mark’s statement that it takes $100,000 to seed your community surprised me. Mark, surely you mean to add a zero to that number. Whatever the number, it’s related to your target audience, for one thing. If you target techie early adopters, all you need to do is start a blog and get mentioned on TechCrunch.

The problem is with most new sites, it’s not the first 50,000 visitors that count, it’s the 50,000 after that. Lots of people will check out your site when it launches, and never come back.

Small nice sites, you better know where your potential members already hang out online. If you don’t, you’re in big trouble, go find them.

I still say it costs several million dollars in marketing money to build up a decent-sized dating site. Some things get cheaper like hardware and development costs due to advances in software. Marketing just gets more and more expensive.

As Sam Moorcroft, owner of ChristianCafe said in Mark’s post, not to dissuade new competitors, but you will most likely lose your shirt trying to start a mass-market dating site these days.

Affiliate marketing is a waste of time unless you are a big name brand. Save your energy for other traffic driving experiments.

Emil Sarnogoev has a seriously great comment on Mark’s blog. Where has he been hiding out? Robert Fathers has a great comment as well, I’m not going to repeat what they say here, I would though, because I agree on almost all points both make.

I agree with Markus on a few points as well. Relationship Exhange could have owned this market and since they have been bought and sold and bought have lost momentum which is too bad they had a good thing going.

Someone named Andreas made a good time-capsule comment, basically that it’s $100k and a 12 months to get a ground-up development project to where existing high-end dating scripts are out of the box.

I say $50k and a month, tops.

If you build, customize or sell dating site systems, scripts or anything related, head on over to the Tools & Services Submit Form and send me your details. I’ll post on the page when I do the next update.

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Handshakes Professional

David Evans — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:43:11 +0000

Handshakes Professional Handshakes is a software that allows you to build your own social and business networking service with totally all features you
may need for this. Script is written in PHP programming language, it
uses MySQL database to store data and Smarty Template Engine to work
with templates and themes (see our system requirements at the top of
this page). All script source code is encoded with Zend Encoder.
Handshakes script is delivered to you with an installer, that will
guide you through all steps of installation. Handshakes script allows
members to connect to each other and build their personal network.

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E-Friends

David Evans — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:41:20 +0000

Price: $280 (with 1 year updates)
AlstraSoft E-Friends is an online social networking software that
allows you to start your own site just like Friendster and Tribe.net.
The E-Friends software allows members to connect to people in their
personal networks and community, creating a new online interactive
resource that is based on a trusted network of friends and associates
on the internet.

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AboutMe

David Evans — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 23:39:44 +0000

AboutMe is an online social networking software that enables you to run your own Friendster, Orkut and Tribe.net site! This script allows users to connect directly to people in their networks and community in a fun and safe way. This site offers a large variety of features, ranging from search tools to profile page. In addition, you will also be able to add more features such as blog, with the advantage of expanding features.

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