Black Box Republic has launched a new personal relationship oriented members-only community. If you run a dating site or social network or are considering starting one, you should pay close attention to the Blackbox Republic launch.

Case in point, last week I was at a Mega-Tweetup at Microsoft in Cambridge and I ran into Stowe Boyd, who I used to work with back when this blog was part of the Corante network. Today, while putting together something for the launch and doing some searches, I see that Stowe, who is not only a guru of social tools and a great writer, is also a friend of Sam Lawrence and April Donato, Blackbox Republic founders.

Stowe says:

This is a community that is likely to have specific needs that will be underserved by other solutions, specifically the eHarmony and other dating services, geared toward the American dream of finding Mr or Ms Right, and promptly getting married.

Read Stowe Boyd’s review of BlackBox Republic. His post is eloquent, informative and far more articulate and thorough than I’m capable of.

If that wasn’t enough, a whole slew of people, from social media guru Chris Brogan to Oliver Marks at collaboration 2.0, are writing about the launch.

Oliver says:

Blackbox Republic is arguably an Apple product to Facebook’s Windows look & feel: a much more intimately crafted, fuller featured personal user interface which should appeal to Apple generation sensibilities.

That sums up my feelings about how PlentyofFish compares to OKCupid.

BBR has room for everyone, but is not for everyone. Definitely catering to non-mainstream folks, it will soon feature a constellation of micro-communities, or groups, called Camps. BBR doesn’t don’t tell people how to organize their camps; we’ll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

There are four corners to the (black) box: vouching, gifting, irl (iphone et al, short-range networking) and events (promoters and yourself). Kind of a cross between the old Matchmaker communities and Facebook groups or fan pages. Some of the functionality is rolling out after the launch, which is more targeted towards founders (if you find me, say hello).

BlackBox Republic’s reputation system, called vouching, makes Adult Friend Finder, Fling and the rest of the adult dating sites seem all the more like the hooker and spam-filled scamlands they really are. I am not mounting my high horse here. There are many, many people who will join these sites and have no intention of actually meeting anyone. They get their thrills from being voyeurs and sending a few emails to women (or men, or transgendered folks) they never in a million years would talk to otherwise. Fling and AFF have correctly identified this market and gone after it with gusto.

But for the rest of us, Blackbox Republic’s vouching makes it easier to trust people you’ve just met, either across town or across the globe. Like testimonials that matter, and we’re written by the marketing department.

Blockbox Republic features three levels of privacy controls. Sliders display your current status, a nice touch. A lot of these features simply need to be experienced to understand how powerful they could be. Notice how I say could be. BBR was not conceived in a vacuum, but it’s always a crapshoot whether or not the public will react favorably once the early adopters have gotten their fill and the masses start to show up. Just look at Google Wave.

Gifting is, well, gifting, with a twist. You don’t simply consume your gifts; they can be displayed for all to see on your Gift Shelf. Your gifts might reflect a certain aspect of your personality. A hello kitty figure would say one thing; a ticket to a burlesque show would say something else about you entirely. Virtual for now, gifts will be more “real” in the future.

As for eHarmony and any sort of scientific matching, Blackbox says, No Thanks. They will be providing all the features they feel necessary to accurately reflect a person’s tastes and preferences and the associated communications channels to connect people. All without the questions, tests and science that’s come to signify serious dating. Remember this isn’t a dating site, it’s more of a social network where dating can happen.

I have never seen so many Internet/socialmedia people writing about a new social/dating hybrid. Part of that is because Sam is a known entity in the first degree of BurningMan/Internet circles. Sam was CMO at Jive Software, SVP GAD at McCann Erickson, VP Business Development at EURO RSCG, VP of Operations at 3Com, VP of Marketing at CNET, and Director of Dell’s Online Consumer Business. He was named a INVESP top 100 Influential Marketer in 2008.

Everyone I’ve talked to about BBR has nothing but glowing remarks for both founders. This goes a long way towards their credibility. It doesn’t hurt that they reached out to the blogosphere many months ago, gave a stellar briefing and made it easy for us to want to help them out. Their pre-launch press section is chock-full of exactly what bloggers and media need to write a story.

Dating and social startups should take away some free pointers here. BBR did a brilliant job with their pre-launch publicity and it shows, just watch how much press they receive in coming weeks.

Speaking of helping them out, go join Blackbox Republic. It’s only $5 and you’re going to see how a site goes from zero members to thousands in a very short time. This could be a great case study for the online dating industry. Great exposure from Spark PR and bloggers all lined up to the point of breaking embargo.

Why is everyone excited about BBR? It’s because the service is interesting, run by amazingly talented people and there is an actual story here. This isn’t some new generic site copying everyone else with zero budget and little understanding of how community, marketing, and technology need to effortlessly combine to drive a successful startup.

Blackbox Republic is a big zag to the dating/social industry’s usual zigs. It’s the anti-Match/PeopleMedia/eHarmony/Meetic/POF.

The last time I remember a site launching like this was Suicide Girls, still one of the best art-sleaze sites out there. Blackbox Republic feels like it’s shooting for the lofty goal of Nerve.com 2.0, with a unique twist, or kink, as it may be.

Where it ends up nobody knows. What we do know is that balancing sex and society and social networking and dating has never quite been done like this and it’s going to be fun to watch.

Now go sign up. Consider it your new community (welcome home), market research (expense it) or just something new to try if you’re tired of general dating and social networking sites and consider yourself outside of the mainstream.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry Weekly Wrapup: 12-11-09
2. Twitter-based Dating with Luvtweets
3. Facebook Gifts: Pushing the Limits of Rationality

During the past year or so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the role Facebook could play in online dating.

I’ve received a lot of feedback from the online dating industry about the possibility of Facebook becoming the worlds largest dating site. Typically I hear that:

- Facebook needs to focus on monitization strategies
- Facebook needs to focus on managing it’s tremendous growth
- There is not enough money in dating for Facebook get involved
- Privacy issues (See Dating Profiles Will Get Their Data From Facebook)
- And lots of other fear-driven reasons why Facebook will never becomes a serious dating platform.

I’m the first to agree that Facebook in it’s current form is not positioned to be a dating site. See You Got Your Match in My Facebook for more on this.

Searching for singles on Facebook around your age in your area code is difficult unless you spend some time figuring out how search works across networks (I may be missing something obvious here). Facebook says there are zero single women looking for men in Boston unless I search in the Boston, MA network. I don’t seem to be able to filter on Boston in the search results. I also can’t filter by age using the high school or college graduation date. I blame all of this on the fact that 200,000 join Facebook every day. They have better things to worry about than search functionality (but not for long).

All of this supports the fact that Facebook itself isn’t going to push into the dating space itself. It’s a platform and it’s job is to make it easy for third-party applications to provide features and functionalty the Facebook won’t/can’t take the time to develop.

Today, fbFund REV 2009 Finalist Thread, Formerly Frintro, Raises $1.2 Million (thanks to Inside Facebook). Thread is a Facebook Connect enabled dating site that allows users to meet friends of friends and/or play matchmaker by making introductions between your friends.

My neighbor Leah Busque, founder of RunMyErrand, turned me on to Thread. Leah was at the fbFund incubator this summer, along with Thread and many other amazing startups based on Facebook. Facebook is evolving as a platform, not only as a destination, and the incubator was a great way to support and fund the companies building out services based on FacebookConnect and the Facebook API.

Here is a Facebook Blog post from Brian Phillips, co-founder of Thread.

The basis for your company, Thread, is to introduce friends-of-friends on Facebook. How did you come up with the idea?
Personal experience. One of our co-founders, Skye Lee, is a consummate matchmaker. She loves nothing more than to set me up. A typical day: I’ll get a phone call from her before we even start thinking about business. “I just found this really cute girl on the street, and she’s single. You should take her to coffee next week. I told her all about you.” When we started to think about business ideas, it hit us — we should just make it easier to introduce people by applying cool technology like Facebook Connect.

Sound familiar? It’s Engage, built on top of Facebook. What Engage spent over $6 million dollars to develop, Thread can do for a million, actually a lot less.

Real online dating is coming to Facebook and it looks like Engage/Kismeet with Facebook Connect added to ease the signup process.

Back in December 2007 even Match got interested in friends matching friends. See Best Friends and Lovers for the latest serious Facebook dating application. Cablight is another “friends matching friends” application on Facebook.

For more on Thread see TechCrunch.

There are thousands of dating applications on Facebook. I’ve written about two of the most successful, Zoosk ($6 million raised) and Are You Interested (partnered with Match) many times. I like the companies, their management team and their shared passion for helping online dating evolve past the current static profile model of dating.

The problem is, the majority of serious daters are not using these applications, and the number of casual daters, while impressive when looking at Powerpoint slides in terms of adoption rates are tiny compared to Match or eHarmony and Yahoo Personals. Zoosk and Are You Interested talk about millions of installs and monthly users, but what of effectiveness? I don’t have numbers in front of me about how many successful relationships have occurred on either application, which I would presume would bolster my argument further. The reality is that when it comes to results, singles have fared better on traditional dating sites than social networks.

The argument quite often centers around Facebook dating applications copying the old Matchmaker model- many geogpaphic, political, religious and sexual-orientation niches within a large dating site. Don’t forget layering in features to make members anonymous during the matching process, because nobody wants to mix their personal peanut butter with their business chocolate.

There is little doubt in my mind that companies like Thread are going to figure this out, paving the way for more robust dating services built on Facebook that serious singles will warm to over time. How can you argue for the status quo big box dating sites and scores of unprofitable niche dating sites when Facebook has over 250 million users to choose from?

Related posts:

1. Thread Slowly Rolling out New Features
2. Facebook Matchmaking With Cablight
3. Thread Offers Matchmaker Rewards

Ed note: I’ll be offline for about a week starting Wednesday 7-29, taking a cross country road trip.

TechCrunch has the highlights of the recent Facebook privacy changes. I’m not talking about the “Can we use your photo in our ads” situation, but how Facebook knows their privacy controls are too complicated and confusing and is implementing features like Transition Tool to make it easier for people to controls who sees what in their profile.

Facebook has to find the delicate balance between user privacy demands and wanting as much information to be publicly searchable and viewable – the more you do that ends up in your activity stream, the more people will click links to apps and other items, increasing the viral nature of Facebook overall.

Perhaps creating a dating network as opposed to a regional network would be helpful. Networks would correlate to particular niches, and be more like tags. There would have to be some way to aggregate tags like straight, LA, runner, kayaking and turn them into a meta-group. Actually, this seems a lot like Matchmaker.

Another baby-step closer to Facebook becoming the largest dating site in the world.

Related posts:

1. Facebook to Open up to Everyone
2. Facebook’s New Privacy Settings
3. Mini-Review: FaceBook Dating Applications

Let’s say a single person wants to try out a handful of dating sites, kick the proverbial tires to see which one performs best for their certain circumstances — geographic location, age, sexual orientation, niche, etc.

Insanity is often defined as “Repeating the same behavior & expecting different results.” While not insane, filling out a dating site profile on multiple sites is annoying, time consuming and people usually fill out the bare minimum amount of personal information necessary to create an account. this is not great for them, and dating sites get clogged up with 1/2-completed profiles, not good either.

All of our personal information is already on Facebook, which is slowly giving third-parties access to our data. This is a win-win-win situation all around. Completed profiles, more people signing up, dating sites perceived as more useful and Facebook gets access to more personal information, which will be useful (we hope), when they figure out how to do target-marketing to members based on their profiles.

To that end, last week Facebook announced the Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what’s going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream, anywhere. As a Facebook developer you’ll also be able to access the stories you’ve published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it’s on a mobile device, Web site or desktop, for users however you choose.

…To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the Facebook Open Stream API in part using the emerging Activity Streams standard.

We’ve also created robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then display the content in the manner most relevant for the user experience. You can filter, remix, or display the stream however you choose, wherever you choose. In addition, through other API methods, users can publish back into the stream, add comments, and even ‘likes’ to any stream item through any interface that publishes to the stream.

The Activity Stream is the first bit of information Facebook is making accessible to developers. While this doesn’t appear to include access to photos and the data in the Info tab, Facebook realizes that it’s quickly becoming *the* place for people to enter in their information and is making great strides towards becoming the center of our online universe. The privacy and legal issues are a bear to understand, much less manage, but it’s getting there.

Match recently rolled out an activity stream, which is a pseudo Activity Stream. To tell the truth I was mildly surprised at this. It’s a good start but they need to keep improving the feature to make it truly useful.

I don’t know when its going to happen, but sometime in the future I hope that when singles land on a dating site they will be able to click a button, read a Terms of Service and have their dating profile populated with their Facebook data.

The impact of this will be enormous. More people will join dating sites, profiles will be more dynamic and robust and dating sites will have deep connectivity with social networking sites. What’s not to like?

I would love to work with any dating sites who are considering the future of integrating Facebook data with their systems. I have lots of great ideas, some general strategies mapped out and have been talking with several talented Facebook developers about how to go about making all of this happen.

Developers, you’ll want to read Using the Open Stream API to get a handle on the plumbing behind the libraries.

Dating site owners should be at least marginally aware of what’s coming down the pike and how it will impact how you run your business. I’m happy to provide my perspective and insight.

LA Times has a nice high-level overview of the Facebok Open Stream.

Related posts:

1. Dating Sites Start Pulling Facebook Data Into Profiles
2. Update Dating Profiles With Facebook Status Messages
3. Facebook to Open up to Everyone

A few weeks ago I had a good conversation with Justin Smith, the editor of Inside Facebook. His blog is a great way to keep up with all things Facebook, check it out.

I think it’s great to see Facebook, Adobe Partner to Create Facebook Platform Libraries in Flash. I wish developers could create new front-ends to dating sites with tools like these. Last year I used the Firefox Greasemonkey extension to mash-up the top ten dating sites, sort of like a dashboard. It was a kludgy hack but being able to view all my emails and search results in one location was an interesting exercise.

Related posts:

1. Yahoo’s New Social Network
2. Stalking by Slider: Facebook Updates News Feeds
3. The Inside Story at Yahoo! Personals

Niche dating sites can be incredibly effective if you’re Jewish, Black, Gay, Athletic or belong to any number of groups where it makes sense to self-identify as part of a particular group of people. Matchmaker was the first site to have many different demographic areas broken out inside a single dating site, but Date.com merged everything into one database when they acquired the site.

These days I’m increasingly interested in how large dating sites are taking advantage of the staggering amount of information the collect about their users. Large dating sites are spending tens of millions of dollars logging, storing, analyzing and refining compatibility algorithms on multi-terabyte data sets based on what users is doing on their sites. Data such as the number of emails being sent and responded to daily and hundreds of other metrics and measurements are being captured, at least I hope they are.

Smaller sub-500,000 member niche dating sites are simply not able to compete when it comes to designing compatibility algorithms and dynamic content display. They have to think smarter about which data to collect and how to feed back what they learn about how people use their site in an ongoing incremental update process. Dating sites are not set-it-and-forget-it enterprises, although this is how much of the industry views itself.

Building a quick site turning on the marketing dollars and watching the money pour in works for a few sites, but is not the golden rule by any means when it comes to competing in today’s crowded marketplace.

The widening gap between niche sites and mainstream dating sites reminds me of when Google was starting to get traction. There was Alta Vista, HotBot, Dogpile and 25 other search engines. In the past 5-7 years the majority of them having fallen by the wayside as Google has risen to prominence. This has not been the case in the online dating industry, yet.

Downloading a dating platform and rolling the dice with a few thousand dollars is almost certainly a recipe for disaster in today’s market. This is not to denigrate dating platform providers. On the contrary, I think there is a lot of room for groundbreaking sites to rise up and take market share from slack dating site operators. but what I’m hearing from people day in and day out is a lack of innovative though in regards to what singles are looking for in a dating site these days and the platform providers are simply providing just that, a platform. That’s where I come in as a consultant.

Dating sites are simply starting up all over the place these days as they try and cash in on the recession-based surge the media has done such a good job mis-reporting.

Lately I’ve noticed that most dating software vendors are reticent about discussing their businesses and that more and more people are building sites themselves, either through software platforms or White Label Dating. I still get 10-20 emails a week from startups, but now they are looking for free feedback on their concept, not the multi-month engagements of the past where I work with them to refine their business models and deal with the 87 issues any dating site startup needs to address in order to be successful.

If the industry is at the point where anyone can launch a dating site or become a pseudo-affiliate of White Label Dating, where is the interesting stuff happening? These days the action and interesting stuff tends to be happening at the top ten dating sites. Thats where the real innovation and growth is occurring, along with one heck of a steep learning curve. And that’s where my focus is moving towards as well.

Lately I’ve been reading more stories like these:

Is Big Data at a tipping point?

Online dating: Your profile’s long, scary shelf life

How Google and Facebook are using R:

Itamar Rosenn at Facebook conveyed how Facebook’s Data Team used R in 2007 to answer two questions about new users: (i) which data points predict whether a user will stay? and (ii) if they stay, which data points predict how active they’ll be after three months?

For the first question, Itamar’s team used recursive partitioning (via the rpart package) to infer that just two data points are significantly predictive of whether a user remains on Facebook: (i) having more than one session as a new user, and (ii) entering basic profile information.

For the second question, they fit the data to a logistic model using a least angle regression approach (via the lars package), and found that activity at three months was predicted by variables related to three classes of behavior: (i) how often a user was reached out to by others, (ii) frequency of third party application use, and (iii) what Itamar termed “receptiveness” — related to how forthcoming a user was on the site.

Facebook’s “In-House Sociologist” Shares Stats on Users’ Social Behavior

These stories may seem to have little to do with online dating, but as a whole they can be seen as incredibly inspiring when viewed from the perspective of someone running an established dating site or looking to start one.

One one end of the spectrum we have bare-bones sites like SinglesNet at the top of the charts, both for traffic and consumer complaints. On the other end we have analysis-driven dating sites like Chemistry and eHarmony (both with their share of complaints as well) leading the charge into massively scalable dating sites able to match members heuristically.

In between we have the niche sites making a tidy profit for a handful of companies focused on satisfying customer demand and hopefully having a good time while they do it.

Then we have the startups, which range from naive to incredibly thoughtful when it comes to business models, marketing plans and expectations. See above.

Each sector of the online dating industry has is own set of issues and objectives but all share these common goals: Attracting members, converting them and then retaining them for as long as possible. This in effect is the essence of online dating and of the work I perform, day in and day out, for five years and counting. These goals will not change anytime soon, but the strategy, execution and resources required the achieve them are evolving drastically. That’s what I attempt to discuss here in the hopes that the online dating industry values my effort and insight enough to warrant hiring me.

As compatibility matching and the systems required to support millions of members continue to increase in complexity, the number of dating site able to compete is going to shrink. This will lead to consolidation, with a few Googles MSN Seach and Ask.com’s in play and then a tier of niche sites catering to 500,000-people communities based on age, sexuality and interest. The rest of the market will solider along, strong enough to live on shoestring budgets and clever marketing campaigns. I think this is exactly where the market needs to go, but the timeline in which this will happen is anyone’s guess.

Anyone who disagrees should go read up on Facebook’s growth, the small number of social networks and the consumer revolt against myriad profiles and demand for simplicity. Online dating is different from social networking in many ways, but the writing is on the wall. What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry Market Size
2. Thoughts on Niche Dating Sites
3. MySpace Launches “My Ads” Self Serve Ad Platform

SNAP has launched it’s first iPhone application, based on it’s popular Facebook Platform dating app ‘Are You Interested?’, which presently has more than 12 million users. SNAP’s new iPhone app allows users to:

• Browse photos of singles in their area and tap “Yes” on people they like
• View their “Matches” and find out who likes them Check out the “Buzz” and meet singles in their area who are online right now
• Contact singles: send and receive winks and messages

I downloaded the app and was prompted for my username and password when I said that I have an existing account. I’ve used AYI on Facebook forever, but what is my username and password? Is it specific to the recently updated Are You Interested website or is it my Facebook login? At areyouinterested.com I see the Facebook Connect login option, which I click. Oops, it’s asking me for my email, password, name, username and birthday. This is so annoying I almost screamed. Ok, too much caffeine today but still, the idea behind Facebook Connect is to make signing up for a site easy. There is a difference between registering and logging in with Facebook Connect and this is the first time I’ve seen it as a registration option which ignores all of my Facebook data. Not great but moving on.

Now there is another screen asking for my country, city gender and if I have an iphone. Why the heck isn’t it pulling at least some of this information from Facebook? Is this not possible?

One thing I’ve learned about Facebook applications is not to shoot the messenger, so to speak. Facebook does crazy things with their API’s weekly and frequently break things. This is also SNAP’s first iPhone app so we’ll try to cut them some slack. That said, they really should have let me beta test it first. Read on and you’ll see why.

Now I’m asked to upload a photo via the website in order to show up in search results. Bravo! This is fantastic, no more “user does not have a photo” problems. But wait, I tried to upload a photo, the status bar froze and I don’t know what to do now. Clicking register again doesn’t do anything, there is no alert helping me figure out my next move. I can’t even go back to the home page. Fail.

I went back to the iPhone application and was able to log in successfully, phew. It seems like the default search says I am seeking males between 38 and 47 but perhaps it’s females and I’m not paying attention? I like the ladies under 40, just saying.

The initial iPhone help screen is a nice touch. The application features five buttons, should be simple enough. Now it’s asking me to upload a photo. But there is no button to click to upload a photo. The registration and photo upload process clearly didn’t get the attention is deserves.

Now I am asked to fill out a bunch of profile fields on the phone. I guess these are the fields that never made it from the website. But I can’t fill them out. I click on (null) for my age and the screen goes blank. Do people even know what null means?

Somehow I get to my profile and am able to change my gender. I decide to cut my losses and restart the application.

I’m greeted by an image of an appropriately-aged female from nearby, hooray, after a kludgy beginning, things are starting to look up.

Clicking on people spins the image around, making it feel like the person’s information is written on the back of the photo. Very Apple, slick.

the filter doesn’t allow me to search around Boston, I’m getting Cheeseheads from Wisconsin.

I clicked next on a cutie and now she’s gone, where is the back button? Of course there is none, they want you to keep clicking. Frustrating but it’s all about the pageviews.

The browse feature is just as it says. You can say Yes or Skip, that’s it. Clicking Buzz displays a chronological list of member status updates. I wish this displayed my Facebook status. Strange that most of the status messages are “Username logged in” right news to text that says “Online Now”, straight from the redundancy department redundancy.

I was trying to figure out how to send someone message. You have to go to thex Connections window, then select Send Message or Send Wink. Not being able to do this from the Browse window is a serious bummer. why not add the buttons in the Browse window.

Connections window has My Likes, Likes Me and Matches. Pressing the buttons is difficult with my wide fingers

The Write a Message feature let’s me compose a message to any combination of My Likes, LikesMe and Matches. Sending default canned messages to groups of people is boring. Why can’t I personalize the message? The ability to write a custom message is available from Buzz:select person:Click Send Message. I’m kind of confused now. Figuring out the specific contexts in which I can perform certain actions is difficult for all applications at first, usually gets easier after using an app for a few days.

Messages window shows my Inbox, Sent and Winks. Business as usual.

I’ve clicked around the few dozen women who have installed the application. At this point I can safely say that I while I prefer the iPhone version over the Facebook application by about 1,000% in terms of simplicity. The Facebook app, with at least 23 actionable links on the front page, has become overcrowded with ads, leaderboards and ways to earn points. But finding the app on my iPhone takes a while (50+ apps installed and no easy way to rearrange them) and I’m at my computer more than out with my phone. It’s also easier to click the multiple emails I receive from AYI each day.

Will the AYI application send me an SMS each time someone winks at me? Will those winks show up in the Facebook application? It appears that nothing I do on the iPhone app shows up in my Facebook stream. Lost opportunity if that’s the case.

Then again, SNAP doesn’t want all their eggs in the social networking basked. That’s probably why they ask for so much information on the website.

The price needs to be 99 cents and much more viral for it to really take off. My guess is that that more people will pay for the mobile version of Are You Interested if SNAP adds location-based services to enable people to perform local search and connections.

It will be interesting to see how Zoosk and Skout respond. Will Skout copy the HotorNot features of both Zoosk and Are You Interested, creating a BrightKite/Loopt/AYI/HotorNot mashup? We’ll see, these social/dating/mobile hybrids are fascinating to explore, especially since no one has created the killer app, yet.

SNAP anticipates revenue in excess of $1.08 million for the quarter ended December 31, 2008, and total revenue in excess of $3.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2008. Not bad for a fledgling social networking application developer cutting it’s teeth on iPhone development at the same time.

Download Are You Interested at iTunes now while it’s free, they’ll start charing for the application in a few days.

Updates:

I can log into the website with Facebook connect now.

The beta Are You Interested site is much cleaner than the Facebook application. It can update your Facebook status but not bidirectionally AFAIK.

The website has three buttons at the top of each photo: Yes, No and Yes (but don’t tell). What does that mean?

Add FourSquare to the mobile/social apps http://tinyurl.com/cns5pt  

Related posts:

1. OKCupid iPhone App Review
2. Beta Testing Match Mobile
3. Update Dating Profiles With Facebook Status Messages

Fred Wilson, who writes the excellent A VC blog, writes that Facebook has announced that they are opening up API access to user’s status updates.

Specifically, your applications can now directly access all of a user’s status, links, and notes via new methods and FQL calls. Your application will have access to any status, notes, or links from the active user or their friends that are currently visible to the active user. In addition, we’re opening new APIs for you to post links, create notes, or upload videos for the current user, and we’ve made setting a user’s status easier. via Facebook Developers blog.

On a service like Match it takes me five clicks and a short waiting period to update my intro and/or headline. Now I know Match would never do this with Facebook because you can’t have customer service reps approving millions of status updates every day, but for the majority of dating sites, reflecting people’s Facebook status in their dating profile is a fantastic way to make online dating profiles more dynamic. Question: How many dating profiles have not been updated in the past 30 days and how does that affect members who appear “stale”?

But as Joshua Schachter (founder of Delicious bookmarking service) explained to me a few years ago now, reduction of services to the simplest user experiences is a powerful generator of focused activity. And that’s what is going on at Facebook and across the social networking sector right now. Status is universal. Not everyone takes photos or videos, or plays games. But everyone has a status and it changes. It’s also quick and easy to post a status message. And it’s massively conversational (something we didn’t quite realize until Twitter users invented the @reply).

I’ve been more active on Twitter lately and it was amazing to see how many people and brands are using the service.

I’ve got emails out to people deep into the Facebook platform about what the continuing openness means for third-party websites. Main question, is a website the same as a Facebook application, i.e., can dating sites actually pull data from Facebook about users’ status messages, notes, shared links, and videos?

You can Share contact info, social graph via Google Profiles too.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Growing By 600k Users A Day
2. Update Your Dating Profile Via Facebook, Firefox And Twitter
3. Dating Profiles Will Get Their Data From Facebook

Facebook has been talking about implementing a micropayments system for more than a year, only to drop the initiative in recent weeks.

to fill the gap, In an aggressive move, Jambool is developing its own payments platform and virtual economy tools for social network applications and online games.

Watch these guys, they’re embedded with a number of popular Facebook applications, but could be kicked off the network tomorrow. A dicey proposition, but as with all interactions with Facebook, get in, make your money and wait to get shut down if you’re too successful. We’ve seen this happen many times and I’m sure Facebook is watching Jambool closely to see how much they pull in.

I particularly like the Social Gold platform, which can be used in other social applications (and other apps?)

Tip of the hat to Inside Facebook for the full story.

Related posts:

1. Amazon Flexible Payments
2. Facebook Dating Applications, Anything Goes
3. Facebook Dating Applications, Groups and Pages

According to founders, Zoosk is now officially the largest “dating app” on Facebook and social networks in general. They recently overtook the HotOrNot lookalike contest crown from Are You Interested, which actually has added some features recently. I’m sure Cliff at Are You Interested will have something to say about the regime change. I’d like to know if Zoosk made over $800,000 in advertising like Are You Interested did last quarter. Speaking of change, tomorrow is a big day! What will Obama say about the proposed dating industry bail-out?

Related posts:

1. Zoosk.com in Beta
2. Zoosk is Crushing All Dating Site Traffic
3. SNAP Interactive Q4 2008 Revenue $1 Million