Google’s Marissa Meyer on how much credit card Companies know about us.

I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy.

News of this came about last year when Visa’s data-mining capabilities were included in the Book Super Crunchers. Visa denies that they track or monitor cardholder maritual status. Yeah, right.

Some dating companies are better than others at leveraging member data to behavior to improve matching results. Unfortunately, the majority of dating sites are driven by underpowered search engines which only return results based on a handful of irrelevant criteria.

Great quote from Ev Williams at Twitter:

Many of the great businesses of the next decade will be about making information about our behaviors more visible.

I would love to see buying habits included in profiles. The information doesn’t have to be public, but credit card companies know an awful lot about us, why not put the data to good use?

Sound interesting? Check out companies doing fascinating things with social buying habits such as Swipely and Blippy.

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Sex.com sells for $13m: Fascinating story about bankruptcy, fugitives and Clover Holdings Ltd, the new owner based on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent.

Match.com UK suggests its members form 80 relationships a day.

*IPSOS OCT 2009

A study carried out by Ipsos for match.com in the UK identified that every day the equivalent to one hundred and sixty members leave the site as couples.

1,000 former match.com members aged 25-60 yrs were interviewed online between the 5th October and 21st October 2009. These members left the site between October 2008 and September 2009. One hundred and sixty members leaving as couples is calculated by the extrapolation of the percentage number of former members who found a partner and consequently cancelled their subscription. Ipsos weighted the sample so that it was representative of the structure of match.com’s former subscribers and the following calculation method was used:

• - 344,681 people ended their subscription between October 2008 and September 2009
• - 1,000 of these people were interviewed
• - 17% gave finding a partner on the site as their reason for leaving
• - 344,681 was multiplied by 17%, which gave the number of couples per year, then per month and per day.

Source: affiliate spam leading to this Match UK landing page. Ninety-nine percent of dating site affiliate marketing ends up in my spam folder. The only emails that ever get through to me are about Match.

17% is very high, good for Match. However, that could be plus or minus a lot of percentage points.

Facelette: It’s FaceTime Meets Chatroul… You Know The Drill (Tech Crunch).

AffCon 2010 – Miami: The Affiliate Marketing Convention.

Happy birthday to me.

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I hear that StyleMePretty wedding blog is possibly going to announce some sort of deal with a dating site. Not much to go on but it’s from a trusted source. Wedding websites are a logical extension for some dating sites, lots more money to be made in weddings than dating site subscriptions.

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard a juicy rumor.

Valleywag says:

What’s going on over at FriendFinder Networks, née Penthouse Media Group? Apparently the effort to migrate into an online publishing and social networking powerhouse is being hampered by developers dissatisfied with working conditions and an inability to hire new staff — even though supervisor Anthony Previte threatened he could replace the disgruntled employees at a whim, according to a tipster.

This could affect the planned $250 million IPO. Then again, consider the source. Still, makes for a juicy Friday rumor.

Related posts:

1. Penthouse Acquires Various, Inc.
2. Rumor: FriendFinder Acquired for $1 billion
3. Blog Problems

After getting teasers from the company last week, I’m refreshing TechCrunch every few minutes because OkCupid is scheduled to make an announcement there today. I’m sworn to secrecy about the few details I have, looks like I’ll have more to share later on today when OkCupid CEO Sam Yagan and I talk.

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It’s come to my attention via several people, that a major dating site is going to announce a background check initiative, expect big news later on in the week.

Speaking of safety, check out TrustPlus (blog). The reputation management company launched into private beta on September. I wrote about them a year ago when I saw their demo at a local web startup event. I’ve helped several companies built similar systems, interested in hearing what people think.

I’m off to what I hope will be an interesting dinner with several companies who have successfully deployed Facebook applications.

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TechCrunch is pushing a rumor that FriendFinder was acquired for more than a billion dollars. What a windfall for founder Andrew Conru if it’s true. Just a few months ago people were saying that Friendfinder (and parent company Various, Inc.), was not a palatable acquisition target due to the nature of the some of the business units (Adult Friend Finder in particular). More as the story unfolds.

Last nights TechCrunch party was a blast, ran into people I knew 12 years ago, several clients and I got to finally meet Michael Arrington.

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Notasinner wrote in to say that he has heard rumors that eHarmony is going to focus more on the Christian dating market. Given the background of eHarmony founders, I don’t see how that is possible, and I would think international expansion would be top of their ToDo list.

I’ve been underwhelmed with the dating industry’s foray into the Christian market, save for a few early sites that have been successful on a small scale, but haven’t been able to take full advantage of the enormous number of Christian singles and lack of quality sites catering to their needs.

Is Christian dating the next big market for dating sites? Sign up a network of mega-churches, filter people based on faith, tie in social networking and you have yourself a nice business.

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Mashable thinks another social networking patent has been awarded to Friendster. Supposedly the patent, filed on August 25th 2006, was issued on March 6th 2007. Friendster already has several social networking patents.

Related posts:

1. Friendster’s Patent Possibilities
2. Yahoo files social networking patent
3. Social Networking Site Rankings

An anonymous tipster wrote in asking:

You should ask why Vintacom has only one person left from management and why Websourced ceased to exist? The only person left at Vinta is Mike Baldock and a couple of IT people. All have gone on to better (non THK) opportunities.

I haven’t exactly been a fan of the recent THK/mining/shell company goings on, seems like a lot of financial activities in play where we won’t know the real outcomes for quite some time.

More on the Think acquisition of Vintacom and it’s sale of Vintacom to a mining company.

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