One more mention of VisualDNA. Can you tell I’m excited about the company?

Today marks the introduction of ProfileWiz (www.profilewiz.com), a new service that produces a 500-word personalized dating profile in less than five minutes. The site poses 22 questions and presents possible answers in the forms of photos. Simply select the photo that answers such queries as “What sparks a conversation with you?” or “If you had an extra hour today, what would you do?” When completed, the quiz produces a written profile that illuminates the user’s personality, dating preferences and desires. The profile is fully customizable, as ProfileWiz offers interchangeable sentences to describe key attributes which can be selected or modified by the user to reflect their unique tastes, mood, humor and attitude. Like having your own, personal Cyrano de Bergerac to pen your profile, the site is capable of writing more than 64.1 trillion possible combinations to ensure the profile is both unique and engaging.

ProfileWiz is the latest site from Imagini (www.imagini.net), creator of patent-pending VisualDNA technology which provides a means of understanding emotions through images.

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1. VisualDNA Launching Quiz Tool And ProfileWiz at iDate
2. Photo-Driven Personal Ad Builder
3. e-Cyrano Offers Private Label Profile Help

I’ve been helping out VisualDNA and wanted to give them a chance to explain a bit more about what they will be presenting at iDate.

I (Ben Fletcher), will be showing off some genuinely new and innovative products for the dating industry. Our VisualDNA quizzes are a natural fit with dating: engaging and compelling use of image-based quizzes to profile yourself or your ideal partner work well with the emotive nature of dating. Higher levels of engagement deliver higher registration and subscription rates. VisualDNA also forms the basis of our automatic profile writer: ProfileWiz. Users can create a well-written profiles automatically and users with better profiles get more date requests. With many trillions of unique combinations, the automatically generated profile is fresh and highly tailored to the personality of the user. We want to talk to people that want to integrate this as a value add for their members, or people that would want to drive us traffic on a revenue share basis.

Several top 10 dating sites are already using their services for lead generation. I really like ProfileWiz. I built something similar as a concept for ProfileDoctor back in the day.

If you run a dating site, you absolutely must take a look at VisualDNA and ProfileWiz.

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1. ProfileWiz Introduces Personalized Online Dating Profiles That Are One in a Million (Actually, 64 Trillion)
2. Fighting Image-Based Fraud And Spam
3. OKCupid Gets All HelloQuizzy

DatingHeadshots and Cupid’s Coach have teamed up to provide online daters with a combined offering featuring quality online dating photos along with profile writing and coaching. The Executive Dating Profile Service includes: a full portfolio of dating photos and 50 minutes of one-on-one phone and email coaching. Online daters now have a one-stop-shop option to create or upgrade their online dating image that’s easy and affordable, with an introductory price starting at $199.

Also note that DatingHeadshots and Honesty Online cross-sell each others services. Get a identity verification (good at Herway, Mate1 and a number of other dating sites) and a verified photo, all in one easy ordering process.

Disclosure: DatingHeadshots is a client.

Full press release.

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1. Honesty Online Partners with DatingHeadshots
2. DatingHeadshots and SafeDate Form Strategic Alliance
3. Honesty Online Identity Verification Services

Once again, OKCupid crushes it with this OKTrends article, The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures. I talked to them about this a while back, glad to see them executing some seriously fascinating, entertaining and thorough research.

Client plug: Read the OKCupid blog post about profile photos and then visit DatingHeadshots.com to get your VIP profile photos.

Speaking of photo optimization, given yesterday’s landing page optimization webinar, this got me thinking about dating site profile page optimization. There is a reason why Match has one of the best profile layouts in the business, it’s clean, simple and fairly easy to decipher. But what if there is some kooky layout which is more effective?

Perhaps Herway has something to say about profile pay layouts, especially since they are in Beta. Remember, Always Be Testing.

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1. OkCupid Design Overhaul
2. What The Heck is Going at At Match.com?
3. Ok Cupid Let’s Others Edit, Rate Profiles

TechCrunch says:

Twitter is preparing to launch a new set of tools that will let third party websites easily integrate Twitter features directly into their web sites and services, multiple sources have confirmed. In a nutshell, this is their response to the massively popular Facebook Connect.

I would like to see more dating sites integrating Twitter feeds, its a simple way to add dynamic features to any dating site. People don’t have to use them, but go read someones Twitter feed for 30 seconds and you can probably tell a lot about them.

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Had a great conversation with CrowdFlower. CrowdFlower is all about making casual or crowd labor reliable. There is a whole new economy being built around the crowdsourcing of labor. This new marketplace is initiating an entire economy of spending around work that could not previously be done online – changing the workforce of tomorrow.

Jobs ranging from research and medical transcription to data entry and content moderation can be crowdsourced to the online workforce.

Computers are great for doing a lot of things fast, but certain jobs need people power.

Crowdsourcing labor will vastly change the way people and businesses work over the next decade.

For workers, it will leave zero room for discrimination (companies won’t even know who is doing the task) and create a complete meritocracy: people getting paid strictly based on the quality and speed of their work.

For businesses, the cloud labor force can help them save money and time while still using real people (and with IDC predicting that IT cloud services will reach $42B by 2012, there is a massive movement happening).

Several dating sites use Crowdflower to manage their user-created content (profiles, photos, etc.) Check them out and tell them you heard about them here.

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1. Dating Industry Jobs
2. OkCupid Offers Singles Economic Stimulation
3. Fr** Online Dating Content

After the Deadline is a software service that adds grammar, style, and spell checking to web applications. You can embed it or download a plugin for common applications. I wish this was around when I was running ProfileDoctor, this is basically what I wanted to build. Let eCyrano and the others charge $100 for profile writing, we wanted to review tens of thousands of profiles every day as part of the initial dating site signup process. Really surprised that no one has done this yet.

Imagine the profile writing textbox containing logic that parses freeform text fields (and outbound emails) With a database of common phrases to be identified and replaced, “I’m just as comfortable in jeans…”. Simple and incredibly useful.

Whitesmoke offered a similar service to online daters several years ago.

Related posts:

1. ProfileDoctor survey results
2. PlentyOfFish Profile Review Forum
3. Thinking about Daily5, Dating Site Ambassadors

iPhone developers like TAT are coming up with a number of remarkable augmented reality applications. The TAT Augmented ID app enables people to point their smartphone at a person and identity them immediately through a link to a special profile. The profile is contextual, you can set it to “after hours” or “work mode”, displaying only the information you want others to have access to, depending on the situation. Hopefully, you cannot be identified unless you have a profile linked to their system (opt-in 100%).

Would you rather be sitting at home rating random people you’re never going to meet in a Facebook application or do it in real-time while you are sending them a virtual gift from across the bar, conference room, or highway? Imagine for a moment all of the remarkable and stalker-ish behavior this will enable.

I engage is some of this behavior right now through Brightkite, Loopt, Skout and a few other Location-aware applications. But I’m not identifying people in close proximity in real-time. Side note, if you don’t use it, check out Foursquare, from the founders of Dodgeball. Something tells me this is going to overtake the apps I mentioned previously, because it gives people a goal, instead of just yammering on about where they are at any given moment, which gets tiring to listen to after a while.

Augmented reality has the potential to be incredibly dangerous, no matter what the creators say. They simply have no idea how the service can be hacked, mashed up with other personally identifiable information, etc. The services’ positive aspects will outweigh the negative, but only if companies pay close attention to implementing tools to respect people’s privacy in a simple to understand way and learn from user feedback.

Less Orweillean in nature, the Social Pond app is a novel way to visualize your social graph (group of friends, co-workers, family).

Related posts:

1. Augmented Identity App Great For Stalking, Death of Business Cards Imminent
2. How to Loose Members Gracefully
3. Iovation Prevents Online Fraud And Abuse

DatingHeadshots and Honesty Online have announced a strategic partnership to provide daters with the tools they want to make online dating more fun and successful. Disclaimer, I work with both companies. Through this new partnership, DatingHeadshots and Honesty Online address two areas that have disappointed users — unreliable photos and inaccurate personal information.

DatingHeadshots, an industry leader in online dating photography, offers professional photo shoots that produce accurate, yet flattering photos to post on a dater’s profile. Honesty Online, a leader in online identity verification, provides a secure identity credential so daters can share verified personal information, such as a dater’s age.

Full press release.

This is a terrific partnership. I’ve been working hard to get complimentary companies to work together while pitching their services to online dating sites. Both startups and established dating sites need an a la carte menu of services to choose from. Right now the online dating business development process seems pretty broken and I hope to change that.

Dating sites often don’t have the technical resources to implement third-party technology solutions, but thankfully this new crop of partners have made integration and implementation much easier than say a generation ago.

Ric Fleisher of Honesty Online was on Ask the Cyber-Dating Expert Radio Show today talking about the company. I spent the 4th of July weekend hanging out with both companies, exciting things are coming, I’ll keep you posted.

Related posts:

1. DatingHeadshots and Cupid’s Coach Offering Executive Dating Profile Services
2. Honesty Online Identity Verification Services
3. HerWay.com and Honestly Online Team Up To Make Dating Safer

My friend sent me this eHarmony email. Click the thumbnail to read the profile text. She is savvy to the whole online dating thing and this is what she said: “I think this is a composite guy that’s just so appealing to someone like me that I couldn’t resist shelling out to meet him….shady!” What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Photo-Driven Personal Ad Builder
2. The Four Big Myths of Profile Pictures
3. Take My Ex, Please: Preowned, Preapproved