What a great week. New clients, the CNBC show Love At First Byte was a big hit last night and today we have a great interview with Catherine and Geoff Cook of MyYearbook.

In today’s episode with MyYearbook we talk about social discovery, the need for social networking to fill the space between the MySpace and Facebook, big mobile numbers and much more.

I ran into Geoff last summer at eAmore in NYC, where he impressed the audience with a great presentation about how big MyYearbook is and what a great fit it is in the social networking ecosystem. The next eAmore event is coming up, February 28th. If you’re in NYC, this is a must-attend event for the dating industry.

Related posts:

1. Social Networking Conference
2. eAmore NYC Newsletter
3. Social Networking Site Rankings

Admin update: having some trouble with the blog, hopefully get it sorted out soon.

Have you looked at the new Subscribe button on Facebook? Among other things it lets people read your updates without being your friend. This, my friends, is yet another indication that Facebook is rolling out features that can ostensibly be used for dating. They just need to read the rest of this post and figure out if more granular subscription options or group invites is the best way to go about sharing specific Facebook data with romantic strangers.

This week I’ve had a number of people tell me about their experiences sharing their Facebook profiles with potential dates. Here’s one way to make Facebook for you in your dating life: Create a new group called AboutMe or something similar, post items you want potential dates to be able to view, and share your facebook url with them (I have a custom url, don’t you?).

What would be even cooler is a link that decays over time, becoming inoperable after say 72 hours. That way you know that those creepers can’t get back into your profile after a first glance.

The subscription button could also allow longer-term access to profile data, sort of like what OkCupid has been doing for years.

Is Facebook going to undermine the entire online dating industry? Of course it is, just a matter of time. Until them, singles should use their Facebook profiles to share details about their tastes, personality and preferences with potential dates. You know, the things that traditional dating sites aren’t very good at doing.

After all, you’ve never seen a Facebook post start with “I can’t believe I’m doing this…”

Read Introducing the Subscribe Button and start using Facebook to meet your match today.

Oh and congrats to Friend Finder Networks for acquiring PerfectMatch. Hopefully they don’t follow in the footsteps of Spark Networks and kill it off like Spark did Engage. Love the idea of the Penthouse business doing deals with the Lifetime network.

What’s the next PerfectMatch product-placement going to be, Must Love Buxom Babes?

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Back from a week in the woods. Have to find a new place to live in the next few weeks and my car died, not how I expected my summer to go, but that’s life.

Plentyoffish blog says that a recent IAC investor call featuring Match CEO Greg Blatt mentions the Okcupid team signed a deal to stay on for a year  and is focused building a Badoo clone that will get profiles via Facebook to compete in the space. Badoo. Sure its big but what a terrible service. Spam and junk all over the place.

In the past, Match has toyed half-heartedly with acquiring profiles via Facebook, but until now, paying for ad space like everyone else has been the only way to get any significant traffic.

After a few years of a learning curve (Deal with Are You Interested, Little Black Book), perhaps Match can step up to the plate.

The investor call is supposed to be available for 180 days. A month after the event and the call has been pulled down already. Anyone have an audio archive of it? I’d love to hear it.

Match.com Pegasus Limited, Mojo Acquisition Corp, Elicia Acquisition Corp, interesting. Thats a whole lot of tax advantage right there. Interesting reading in regards to the Match deal with Meetic. The deal alone will cost 3 million Euros.

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Yesterday I speculated at length about Match.com’s plans for Facebook. Since then, several readers wrote in to point me to the Stir application by Match that recently launched on Facebook.

Match has taken a subset of its core functionality and is running it as an application on Facebook. Call it Match-Lite. Looks like it launched around June 15, with 5,642 monthly active users so far. More info at AppData.

Stir is a social dating application built just for Facebook users as a fun way to meet millions of singles in your area. Stir was built by Match.com, the leader in online dating, so you can be sure that your privacy will be protected.

Lets parse this statement. Stir, which is on its 3rd or 4th incarnation at this point, is the name of the app, yet I am asked to log into Match.com during the sign-in process and to further complicate things Stir displays my Match profile. Stir never really knew what it was and ended up a going.com clone for finding bars (or something). And now it’s not that, but its on Facebook, and its profiles are actually Match profiles.

And what is social dating? Spamming, I mean inviting, your friends to join Stir is not social. Thats viral K-Factor functionality and cheap acquisition costs. All good for Match but there is absolutely nothing social about Stir which was quite surprising.

Can I match my friends with each other? No. Can I recommend someone to my friends? No. Can I find a great place for a date? No. Can I check in on a date to earn points? No. Can I earn the equivalent of a Foursquare Mayorship? No. Can I perform tasks that make nearby people visible  (in a safe manner)? No. Can friends vouch for friends? No. Read on to learn that the social/sharing button on Stir doesn’t even share profiles.

You simply can’t say you are social and then not feature anything even remotely social in terms of functionality. What’s going to get anyone to logging into Stir more than a few times?

Lets call it Match Lite for now.

I can imagine middle America starting with the app and wondering if they are on Facebook, Stir, Match or something else? Am I chatting with friends, hooking up with hotties, helping my buds meet women? What am I doing on Stir? At this point most people are going to bail and go back to Match.com.

Match went a long way to make Stir feel very similar to Match.com. Can you tell the difference between the Match.com and Stir screenshots below? I think this is a huge missed opportunity for Match. Stir originally was a chance for Match to break out of the “steady as she goes” mold. New people, new programmers, new design, new features, new functionality. And yet this latest reincarnation of Stir is a replica of Match on Facebook. Whats new here?

There are so many sites that I no longer visit directly. They all have Facebook apps, which are basically the site’s web pages embedded in a Facebook page.

Imagine if you could read your Match emails on Facebook and do just about everything else right inside Facebook? Turns out you can. I’m going to change my Match email address to my Facebook email so my Match messages show up there. We’ll see how that goes.

Match in Facebook, great. Save a few minutes a day and give me back some of the five hours a week we spend on Match.

We’ve watched Match mature over the years. We can’t be too hard on them this early in the game. But now is when we need to let them know right up front what we expect from them. The folks at Match are very smart. They can choose to evolve Stir into something thats actually fun and interesting to use and perhaps even remarkable in some way.

They have this baseline Stir app launched and could and build select awesome functionality on top of it. They can learn about leveraging the virality of certain social features.

If Match is serious about figuring out how to leverage social to improve matches I’m first in line to help. But if they come at Stir with the notion that its all about reducing customer acquisition costs, they deserve to fail (again). Match has had their Google moments of botched social launches. Now its time to get it right.

Singles are screaming from the rooftops for new types of online dating sites. Match can heed their call with Stir, or simply continue their global acquisition strategy and spend the next decade inching closer to the billion-dollar revenue mark. There is nothing wrong with that, but incremental growth is not very interesting from the outside.

Plenty of companies make money doing dating on Facebook, and more power to them. At some point the game is not solely about money and customers, its about improving the efficiency of the system. Because that will bring in more customers than any commercial or viral video or feature. Churn and burn is exhausting and usually unsustainable, ask any online marketing professional.

Will Facebook matter one iota to dating sites? The viral growth has all but evaporated now that Facebook has forced companies to buy ads. Perhaps Match crack the viral code and sign up another 100,000 paying members on Facebook. That would be a spectacular win for them. Speaking of new members, what role will Meetic have in all of this? Same goes for People Media and OkCupid. Will we see profiles from these sites on Stir? I hope so!

Lets talk more about the Stir features that stand out. Match Profiles on Facebook have a new share button. Unfortunately the share button leads to the friend invitation feature. Not what I expected. So much for a social dating application.

Present:  Inbox, sent, winks, favorites, who’s viewed me. Ability to edit profile and photos.

Speaking of winks, I hope Match takes a page from the OkCupid playbook and enables or even forces people to add a twitter-like short msg to winks. Men who wink at women with no follow-up email are admitting they aren’t very clever and are generally frowned upon. So why does Match keep the feature as it is? This is a great way for Match to assert itself in going a bit out of the box and enforcing some best practices on members.

Some of the features don’t run in in an iframe on Facebook as usual. To edit your photos a new tab/window pops up with the Match.com photo editing page loaded. Awkward to change sites like that, especially in a new window. Either you are in Stir on Facebook or you are on Match. Mixing the two up is confusing.

Missing: Access to filtered email, advanced search such as mutual and reverse match. No ability to block people. Seriously?

One thing I noticed immediately is that I didn’t recognize any of the women presented to me in the search results. It would be great if Match could carry over my search criteria. Conversely, this could be a fantastic opportunity to show me new people. By new people I don’t mean relaxing search criteria, but some more edge cases that I might have passed on previously.

New: Newest Members, but what is that “1″ on connections? Nothing is highlighted, thats a bug. Scratch that, newest members is accessible on Match.com, its tucked away on the search page.

Interesting that I saw “Find single BBW’s in your area” at the top of a search results page on Match. The profiles didn’t act like the usual ads when I moused over them, and seeking a distraction, I clicked and guess what it took me to People Media’s BBWPeopleMeet. One more click and my Match profile was copied over the the new site. That is slick!

These BBW women looked great so I clicked on them. Unfortunately all of them appear to be fake. At least take me to their profile page.

Back to Stir. Wondering about what Stir looks like if you are a non-paying Match member. Can you message other non-paying members on Stir? Need to investigate this. Please leave a comment if you have tried Stir as a non-paying Match member.

It would nice if Stir used keyboard shortcuts for navigating photos. I am still waiting for  Cover Flow-style photo displays, but Stir does have forward-back buttons on the lightbox.

Look at the ads in the sidebar. As you can imagine, the sidebar ads, which for me are 99.9% singles ads everywhere else on Facebook, are actually targeted and useful. Angry Birds, how to launch a successful fan page and a few ads about blogging. Totally up my alley.

Lets talk type. The light gray text used in the Stir application is unreadable. There are amazing designers in the Match empire and they chose to launch with light grey text? To put it another way, they spent a huge amount of money and effort to re-launch Stir on Facebook and the text looks awful. There are also a number of font color issues. No dealbreakers but its called attention to detail.

Designers simply haven’t learned how to design html for Facebook yet. Or maybe I just demand a lot more from my apps than most people. Hello Google Web Fonts or the awesome TypeKit. Why do I even have to bring up typography?

Its going to be a problem to count visitors split between Facebook and Match.com, but I’m sure they will come up with something. Interesting to see how the new Stir affects Match’s overall traffic.

Will Stir drive new Match.com signups? Will Match network traffic go down once people realize they can manage their Match profile and email on Facebook? Which Match property will benefit the most from Stir? SeniorPeopleMeet makes sense or perhaps a Meetic property in Europe. How does Facebook ad revenue compare to Match.com site network revenue?

Could Match end up loosing money because Stir becomes too popular?

In closing, lets back up for a moment and look at the big picture. Stir is a month old, the code isn’t even dry yet. Facebook is a pain to develop for. Its like giving Gershwin a piano with 1/2 of the keys ripped out.

Match has been working their tails off for two years quietly accomplishing Big Things that are way ahead of every other dating company. I went to Match and heard their stories, saw what they are doing and came away impressed.

They are capable of doing great things and its going to take them a long time to figure out social. I don’t blame them for taking a few years off and letting Facebook settle down and users get into a routine before launching a new social dating app.

Its was risky to launch Match-Lite on Facebook with no social features. Stir has a long way to go before its even remotely interesting enough to attract signification attention.

I imagine the folks at Badoo, with 120 million members and a huge presence on Facebook, are watching Stir very closely.

Are you using Stir? What do you think?

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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.

<meta property='og:title' content='agood1foru2know'/>

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

<meta property='og:type' content='match:person'/>

My full profile address (Match login required)

<meta property='og:url' content='http://www.match.com/profile/showprofile.aspx/?uid=B88an16AMuFBZCSkMRWw5A==&handle=agood1foru2know&tp=ms&trackingID=526684&bannerID=747303' />

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?

<meta property='fb:app_id' content='89318d7e8d124c0eb6dc64adcbb14c60'/>

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

<meta property='og:description' content="What's up summertime singles? Meet a left-of-center ENFP, cynical and funny optimist, pretty charismatic or so I'm told."  />

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.

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A great time was had by all at the eAmore Dating Industry Summit in New York. 150 people got together in Brooklyn to listen to dating industry executives, startups, financiers and vendors.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with the event. The main gripe was that the schedule ran too long, and this will certainly be addressed at the next event. From my perspective this was easy to overlook while engaging with a roomful of bright young and passionate dating entrepreneurs for a few hours at a hip event space under the Brooklyn Bridge.

I felt like an elder statesman. Some presenters were 12 when I started covering the dating space. I ended up spending a lot of time on stage and tried to educate and provide perspective by sharing what I’ve learned working with dating sites over the years.

One issue that was continuously reinforced throughout the night is that entrepreneurs tend to avoid focusing on previous attempts in their market. This can be useful if they leverage their myopia in positive ways, or may lead to pain-inducing times if they don’t understand how the market has evolved. That’s where I can help.

Some of my rapid-fire “state of the dating industry” presentation ended up repeating key points Sam Yagan made in his keynote. Example: Social exhaust data is interesting in dating profiles but no one is leveraging it to its full capacity. Mobile is easy to get into, difficult to succeed. The Q&A with Sam was super, he is one of the nicest and smartest people in the industry. We could have listened to Sam talk for an hour straight, he’s that good.

Here’s part 1 of a recap for those of you who were unable to attend. Leave a comment if you have found other write-ups of the event and I’ll add at the bottom. Speaking of attending, people came from all over the US and several people who went to iDate LA came to eAmore on their way home which was great!

As an optimist cynic who thinks he’s heard it all, I learned an incredible amount from some very bright people hell-bent on changing online dating for the better.

The event turned me on to a number of new concepts based on previously-attempted ideas that failed to get significant traction in the marketplace. Examples: mobile matchmaking, white label providers, introduction services and dating site meta-search. Reality is that sometimes it takes a few iterations of an idea for it to take off. Society has to be ready, technology advances, having enough money, the right founders and team and plenty of luck are required to succeed in the dating industry.

Mobile was a hot topic. Most services had or are planning some sort of mobile apps. HowAboutWe talked about their new mobile app.

Andrew Weinreich, founder of mobile dating service MeetMoi was the moderator. Kudos to Andrew for his efforts to keep the event moving along and insightful Q&A sessions.

Parlor.fm is soup-to-nuts voice-based social networking. Almost too much to comprehend in a quick demo. Founder brought LoveDetect to market, a concept I love to this day.

LoKast, creators of disposable social networks impressed. Great for parties and events.

MeepMe has a new take on flirting at events. Lots of UPenn/Wharton people at the event.

A Small World-inspired Invite-only services like Refreshing Note and Clique NYC caught my attention. Great examples of leveraging local networks and the social graph.

I enjoyed finally meeting Lori from Cheek’d. She has great energy and while I was lukewarm from the start on “dating business cards”, her foray into Facebook is worth paying close attention to.

Moonit is based on better relationships through astrology, and does a good job masking the new-age feel of most astro-based services. They have a new API available to dating sites. I can’t believe I didn’t get a chance to say to Dana, who I’ve spoken with a number of times but never met.

Same goes for so many people. I was on stage too much and didn’t get to mingle enough until the very end of a long night. If I didn’t get a chance to say hi, please don’t take it personally. I’d love to talk with you if you are doing something interesting in the dating space.

Spent time with Kareem Ahmed, the founder of Inbox Cupid, a Groupon-style service where members are the deal of the day. I am totally bullish on the concept, huge potential. I would be surprised if the company didn’t attract investment interest in the near future. Kareem called me the Simon Cowell of the dating industry. I’ll take that as a compliment.

Special thanks to Adam Ludwin at RRE Ventures for talking about some of his criteria for investing in dating-related companies. RRE’s money in HowAboutWe is being put to good use. There has been a lot of discussion in the crowd about if suggested date ideas are a strong enough driver of growth.

One key indicator that HAW is on to something is that dating sites are copying the idea.

eFlirt Expert’s “How to pick a dating site” eFlirt Engine service won my vote for most likely to succeed. Built in a “startup weekend” environment, singles need a place where people can go to select the dating site that is right for them.

I love Lokast and a few other demos were great, but there are 60 million people not dating online in the US and we need to get people educated and comfortable with online dating. Then they can go hog-wild with mobile apps and Twitter and all the rest. Plenty of room for new and novel startups, that’s for sure.

Luv@FirstTweet leverages Twitter to build your profile on the go and then match you with other people. I’m slowly warming up to the idea that Twitter can play some sort of role in the matchmaking process.

MyYearbook and Hotlist both talked about social sites with a dating component. Hotlist is a social discovery engine that enables you to view where your Facebook friends and crowds have been in the past, are checked-in right now, and plan to go in the future. MyYearbook, which has that Myspace feel it it, gets over a billion pageviews/month.

I’ll follow up with some more thoughts on eAmore in a follow-up post. Did you attend? Leave a comment and let us know what you thought, it will help us improve the next one.

My hat is off to Maria for putting together a solid event, thanks for all your effort. I’m already looking forward to the next event. In the meantime I’ve got some smaller get-togethers and webinars planned, stay tuned.

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Single Edition is helping brands build chemistry with single consumers.  In a few short months, their vision for creating a singular focused digital agency has exceeded all expectations.  Single Edition Media now yields more than 2 million monthly impressions based on partnerships with multitudes of editorially-vetted lifestyle bloggers, connecting brands with single women and men in a way no other social media company can.  That’s millions of singles who travel, entertain, parent, date, cook,  dine out and own homes with whom your brand should connect.

Talk to Sherri Langburt and tell her Online Dating Insider sent you. She is awesome and totally on top of her game, servicing People Media, HowAboutWe and many other dating sites. Sherri will be at eAmore next week, along with many other dating industry startups and veterans from around the globe.

Cupid plc has acquired 75% of two German online businesses, OnlineLiebe GmbH and WomenWeb GmbH, for €2.75m (£2.5m). The two companies are run together by the same team in Munich, led by founder Andreas von Maltzan, who is recognised as one of the pioneers and leaders in the German dating market, having established Neu.de, Germany’s most popular dating site, which was sold to Meetic in 2007. Andreas has a track record of producing successful German online businesses and will continue to run the German sites, becoming a valuable addition to Cupid’s management team.

Build big dating site, sell, rinse, repeat. Nice job Andreas and the team.

The founder of CatholicSingles found his wife on his site. I can’t tell you how many people say they started a dating site to find their wife.

When I started working on CatholicSingles.com, I truly wanted to fill a void and bring like-minded Catholics together.  While finding my own match was a goal, I never would have guessed how that journey would unfold,” says David Nevarez, President of Catholic Sites, Inc.  ”With so many wonderful couples having married with our help, it’s very satisfying and a privilege to have my opportunity as well.  As far as I know, CatholicSingles.com is one of the only dating sites to have married off its founder!

And you thought filtering scammers on dating sites was difficult: New Japanese Pop Idol Shocks Fans With News–She’s Not Real.

Match is on a real tear lately. New photo display, broken-out profile sections and much more. This caught my eye. Is my profile complete or not?

People are always talking about advertising on Google and Facebook, but it seems like every time I settle into a Youtube session I see a ton of Plentyoffish ads and no other dating sites. Last year I remember emailing Markus because the POF ads on YT were all pixelated, he had forgotten all about them.

I wonder how many members POF picks up every day from YouTube?

My friend has a dating blog called Flirting With Disaster. She signed up for Plentyoffish and received 500 emails in 12 hours. Blog fodder for weeks to come.

The Anatomy of a Fundable Startup by Naval of AngelList. Good stuff for dating entrepreneurs.

Why Optimus Prime Is Still Single: WIRED Magazine talks to OkCupid about determining the best approach with your dating profile.

Here’s a couple of screenshots of Flowbar, a new dating/social site on Facebook. Nice badge system and earning/sharing drinks and other social features. Still trying to figure out how it works, lots of features to explore.

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The Like-Ification of 2011: Saad Khan is an investor I’ve spoken to a few times. He writes for, among other things, VentureBeat, and I really liked this statement he made about Liking things on Facebook.

If 2010 was about gamification, then 2011 will belong to people who can figure out what to do with what we like.

last July more than 65 million people were “like-ing” stuff on a daily basis. That’s more than 17.5 billion “likes” over nine months.

Its imperative that dating sites begin leveraging what people Like on Facebook. DateBuzz used to pull in your likes, tastes and preferences, but thats the easy part. Now its time for intrepid dating pioneers to build matching systems that take Likes as fuel and output better matches based on the fact that we Like Celine Dion, tractor pulls, Sarah Palin and Egypt.

If you can’t afford  a dozen people working on a behavioral matching system for your site, at the least you can pull in likes and start building a foundation profile of your members based on Facebook “exhaust” as the cool kids call it now.

Another quote of interest:

Xbox Kinect already authenticates my face and pairs it with my player profile. Imagine what that could mean for your status updates.

Can you imagine updating your dating profile by standing in front of an Xbox and talking? Futuristic indeed, but hey kids, thats the direction our digital lives are heading.

What are some startup ideas that persistently fail?

Here’s a quote from Quora, the best Q&A site you’ve never heard of.

Yet another dating site
Why?
1) Insufficient distinction from all of the other dating sites
2) I lie about my weight/income/humor – you lie about your fitness/degree of bitterness/coolness and thus a high level of disappointment and frustration follow.

StreetSpark, the new iPhone app for offline dating

StreetSpark lets you know when you’re in the right place at the right time to meet your match. StreetSpark’s “Social Matching” technique garners your activity across other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, and Foursquare and then matches you to other StreetSpark users, creating more real matches, based not only on common interests but also the recent activities you share, letting you live your life without interference and constant checking.

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Vindicia launches new version of CashBox billing solution. A few weeks ago I met up with vindicia CEO Gene Hoffman, who told me they now have a number of big dating sites as clients. Gene is awesome, his team is top-notch and they really understand customer retention and acquisition through integrated marketing best practices like no other company I’ve come across.

Hanginout is an Interactive Video Q&A Publishing Platform. Chris Dunn, who was CEO of Mobeze (OnlineBootyCall, Herway), is a co-founder.

I don’t understand Cloud Girlfriend, who’s tag line is “The best way to get a girlfriend is to already have one.” Its a mashup of Match and SecondLife but the description is “We allow people to define their ideal self, find their perfect girlfriend or boyfriend and connect and interact as if that person existed. It can help in learning how to manage a real relationship, and they then take it into the real world.” I’m all for giving singles the tools they need to be better daters, but this is a bit over the top. More at TechCrunch.

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Received from Breakup Notifier:

We’ve got some great news. Facebook has decided to reinstate Breakup Notifier. We’re sending you this email because we noticed that you signed up to use Breakup Notifier within the last week.

If you would like to continue to get relationship updates sent to your email, please re-authenticate Breakup Notifier by clicking this link and connecting with Facebook.

This is the last email you will receive regarding this update. If you have any questions, email faq@breakupnotifier.com.

Now we can get back to stalking potential dates. I’m doing the reasonable thing and following Charlie Sheen’s “Goddesses“.

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