This morning I had a Skype videochat with Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg and Shar Dubey, Vice President of Product. Mandy and Shar took some time out of their busy Internet Week in New York schedule to share supplemental detail to the Match blog posts and press releases flying around the intewebs today.

Let’s start with a few paragraphs from the boilerplate announcement.

Match.com, the largest dating site in the world, is transforming the American dating experience with new, innovative features for connecting people that eliminate the distinction between online and offline dating. Rolling out nationally over the coming weeks, Match.com will launch The Stir, a service that brings single people together in thousands of events across the country, and a proprietary collection of dual-player games designed to let people get to know each other online in a fun, natural way. The games will be available to all Match.com subscribers this summer, and the Stir will begin rolling out in more than 20 U.S. cities by June and nationwide by September.

Match blog post: The Stir: Events by Match.com.

“Our mission has always been to help single people have more success at meeting new people, in order to give them a better chance of starting a relationship,” said Match.com President Mandy Ginsberg. “Now the advent of new technologies has allowed us to leverage our massive national membership scale to meaningfully expand the extent and nature of the positive impact we can have, and to make it more fun and natural along the way.”

Notice how the company line is to give people a better chance of starting a relationship. They never promise that their matching algorithms are perfect, only that they will surface, or expose to you the most appropriate people (according to Match). After all, people are really good at screwing up relationships, Match just takes the credit for introducing them to you. The nuance of this statement seems to be lost on a lot of people.

Fun and natural is not a phrase commonly associated with online dating. Will the re-introduction of live events make dating via Match more fun and natural? Lets find out.

Consider the phrase “Leveraging massive national membership” from the press release. This is something that most dating startups don’t seem to grok at a deep enough level. Match and Spark and POF and several other sites will out-bid you on keywords on Facebook and Google so badly that you will never have a chance at competing with them. Thats a fact of the business. I’ve never seen a new dating site in a decade that didn’t make it to the big time without an enormous marketing budget. It doesn’t matter if you’re mobile, or friends matching friends or you give every new member $25.

With 10-20,000 new members every day (a mix of paid and free subscribers), Match can afford to try something new every once in a while. Not that they venture outside of their comfort zone very often. But who’s to blame them, mo’ members, mo’ money has been the name of the game for Match the last few years. The company has around 1.7 million paying members, with three million people paying a subscription fee over course of the year.

When it comes to marketing, Match is going to to a big push around Events and Games (we’ll talk about games later), including television. I love the Match TV ads, which strike a positive note while depicting first dates, traditionally perceived as very uncomfortable experiences. Hopefully we can show you the new ads here before they launch nationally in the US.

Match has been doing a number of test market events, focusing on different crowds ranging from young to urban, gray-hairs and even the gay market.

We’ve talked about MatchLive in previous posts. That was a decade ago before everyone involved with the new Match initiatives were even at the company. After a decade of online dating, perhaps singles will warm up to the idea of congregating with other singles expressly at a given location to meet others interested in forming relationships.

Then its just a matter of Match’s silicon brain inviting the right people to the events. Cooking classes are stupid, I don’t want to hang out with losers at some lame bar on a Monday night. I want to drink scotch and then hunt deer with grenade-tossing brunettes. An extreme example  the breadth and diversity of singles in America, but indicative of the challenge Match faces as they strike various event partnerships, which will be super-important to the success of the Events initiative.

Now, let’s talk mobile.

The Stir will feature a whole bevy of functionality focused on increasing pre, during and post-event discovery and messaging. See who’s going to be at an event, discover like-minded folks during events, and stay in touch with them afterwards. During the event, food, drink and other specials will be offered via mobile as well.

While lots of people have smart phones, the majority are still using feature phones. That was great when Dodgeball was *the* social networking app for mobile, but these days, getting a solid feature set to run across myriad phones is a PITA. Match is going to be trying and testing things to see what works best for the largest amount of people.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the Crowded Room app has nothing to do with The Stir. I would have thought that with all the effort IAC, Match’s parent company, put into CR, that it might be part of the mobile aspect of Events & Games. Not so.

Talking about mobile Shar said something interesting, that they would love to have technology like Bump for sharing information. I’ve been using Bump for years, and am surprised that it’s not been acquired and rolled into iOS as a baked-in feature. Sharing custom contacts and photos, revealing only what you feel comfortable with a certain person, is a great way to network. At first you get a few photos of me and my throwaways gmail address. If things progress nicely, I’ll share more personal information, perhaps even my Facebook URL.

At The Stir, answering questions in order to be connected with people is in the works. Kind of reminds me of Lock And Key Parties, which are actually quite fun, if not overly analog in a digital dating world.

Oh, and The Stir is not going to have speed dating, so 8 MinuteDating and all the rest don’t have anything to worry about. Now Speeddate.com, something tells me they should be a bit nervous.

Besides the algorithm improvements (can I get an ROI on that please?), the last Match feature of any import that I remember talking about was Daily 5, and that was several years ago. Granted, over the last few years Match went out and bought most of their competition. People Media, Meetic, OkCupid. who else is there to buy that can contribute meaningfully to the Match empire? I’m not talking just eyeballs, but value to the company, in terms of innovation. Its too bad that the dating industry doesn’t take after Facebook, buying a few companies a month, usually called talent acquisitions, to bolster certain areas like matching, messaging and meetups.

Back to the Company Line:

The Stir, consisting of hundreds of local events each month, will range from large-scale happy hours to more intimate events, such as cooking classes, wine and tequila tastings, dance lessons, bowling nights, rock climbing and more.

A big part of meeting people is going out and being social, and the Stir improves that “going out” experience. When you go to a Stir event, everyone will be single, everyone will be looking to meet someone, and each event will be customized through our group matching algorithms in terms of age, gender and interests. In short, the Stir addresses some of the fundamental pitfalls of a typical night out for single people.

Members can learn about and sign up for these events via Match.com, and subscribers can even invite friends and bring them along as an added benefit. At each local event, attendees can leverage their mobile devices by checking in and receiving special offers from the venues on food and beverages. Over the coming months, Match.com plans to introduce other ways for online elements to enhance the event experience, such as the ability to invite other members to an event, create in-event engagement, and re-connect online afterward.

As part of an ongoing beta program, Match.com has organized 60 Stir events across 10 U.S. markets to date. The response has been tremendous, and the initiative will accelerate by September to include over 200 events each month, with thousands of people participating every week.

Like most cocktail parties, Match has observed that the first 45 minutes of singles events can be uncomfortable. After that, people tend to relax and loosens up, due to alcohol intake or just that sense of “What the hell, I’m here, might as well make the best of it.” Getting people to stick around that first 45 minutes is key. If I went to a Match event, I’d show up right when it starts.

Match has created a new Events business unit to manage the many moving parts behind getting hundreds of thousands of people to attend hundreds of events each month. The logistics behind marketing, managing third-parties like cooking schools that take payment for services and have to share that money with Match, evolving the algorithm to suggest better blends of compatible singles, and many other tasks, is no doubt daunting.

Speaking of algorithms, its interesting to see Match extracting additional value out of their greatly-improved matching system. I’ll leave it to you to define greatly improved, but allegations of ineffective matching systems aside, the Match system is pretty amazing and its great to see them leveraging it to create pop-up singles events with at least a bit of the randomness removed.

I learned long ago that certain types of people will always say dating algorithms doen’t work. I’m tired of that discussion. Of course they don’t work very well, but at least dating sites are beginning to make an effort to move matchmaking out of the Paleolithic era. Nothing else I or anyone else can say or do is going to change this anytime soon. Remember, dating sites are simply introduction services. Once you make them out to be more than that, you put them on a wobbly pedestal thats guaranteed to disappoint some of us from time to time.

eBay needs to be perfect, days in and day out. Online dating is, and will always be, a best-effort industry.

Creating more meaningful connections is what Match is about, and they are getting serious about innovating past the “online dating hasn’t changed in a decade” argument that is perpetually thrown at the industry. With The Stir, Match has two primary areas of focus, increasing customer lifetime value and converting free members and their friends into subscribers, all while we’re checking in to locations, getting free drinks and chilling out with other singles at freeform early-week bar takeovers or more structured, fee-based events. After talking to Mandy and Shar, I’m pretty optimistic about the new services. I’ll definitely make the trip into Boston to go to one of them to check it out to see how different they are from the many other live events I’ve attended over the years.

As I was writing this I came across SceneTap on VentureBeat.

Imagine this. You and your girlfriend walk into a neighborhood bar, order a cocktail, and, unbeknownst to you both, a camera above is scanning your faces to determine your age and gender. Your deets are combined with data on other bar patrons and then spit out to looky-loo mobile application users trolling for a good-time venue with the right genetic make-up.

SceneTap is a maker of cameras that pick up on facial characteristics to determine a person’s approximate age and gender. The company works with venues to install these cameras and track customers. It also makes web and mobile applications that allow random observers to find out, in real-time, the male-to-female ratio, crowd size, and average age of a bar’s patrons.

And you thought Facebook and Google knew a lot about you. Seems like the natural evolution of Assisted Serendipity. The Chicago-based startup went live in San Francisco at 25 bars on Friday.

Next up, Calling All Players: Match.com Wants You

Related posts:

1. Match.com Re-Launching Match Live Events?
2. JDate live events
3. Live Events making a comeback

This week Match.com’s PR department reached out to set up a time to talk about an important upcoming announcement. Then today the Match blog, Up To Date, features a post, Stay Tuned for an Exciting Announcement from Match.com.

Match.com will be making a BIG announcement on Monday, May 14th that will change the way singles connect, meet, and date- online and offline! Stay tuned here on the Match.com blog to hear the exciting news before anyone else on Monday.

Companies usually show their hand a bit early, often via inadvertent slip-ups, and it appears that Match has done this. The image name for the blog post is “match-events-preview-pic1.”

More obvious, the photo shows a man and a woman in front of a bowling ball rack. Steve Jobs was the master of misdirection but unless Match has taken a page from the Apple playbook, the image is telling us that some sort of live events service is coming from Match on Monday.

Here I go out on a limb to pre-announce that Match is bringing back live events next week. Let’s break it down, shall we?

Like many “new” things happening in online dating, what’s old is new again. Match ran Match Live for several years, shuttering the service around 2004. I went to a number of Match Live events ranging from dinners to wine tastings to Celtics games. It was a great way to meet 25 or so Match members all at once in the flesh, without resorting to speed dating. These were fun yet ultimately useless events. You couldn’t filter the people who showed up, and I was often stuck at a dinner table with people I had nothing in common with, but that was part of the allure of the experiment. Who shows up at these events and would I like them? Turns out I liked the sporting events better than the company, but it was a good and worthwhile experiment.

I think the official explanation of the demise of Match Live was that events were too much work and didn’t bring enough value to members. Someone correct me if this is wrong. Events were basically a drain on Match. Some portion of attendees were already paying members, so Match was spending money while actually reducing customer lifetime value. But then again there was a $25 fee, so there is some revenue but damn that is an expensive way to make money, especially with the event coordinators in each city. I wonder if they saw live events as a way to convert free members to paying members?

Could live events have anything to do with Speed Dating? Thats great for some people. Some people being a fraction of a percent of the overall dating population. Few experiences register on the awkward scale higher than speed dating. I have two absolutely hilarious speed dating stories that I’ll share on here someday. Not a bad business for a few companies though.

If Match is bringing back events, what form will they be in? Lets see what we know so far. First fact, Match cloned HowAboutWe. This was incredibly poor form on Match’s part and I will never forgive them for screwing over HAW. Match spent millions on the dog we call SinglesNet (another rare screw-up on Match’s part), and they didn’t have the decency to at least flow some cash to HAW for doing all the innovation and hard work for them. That said, tons of sites have cloned HAW by now, but still, Match, grrrrr. Read Match Flatters HowAboutWe By Copying Them. Again. for details.

Rant over, now lets get creative and throw in the idea of group dating on top of curated dates. There are only two people in the announcement photo, which dampens the prospect of group dating, but you never know.

Traditional or group date, the question becomes how will Match approach group events to avoid the problems they had with them almost a decade ago?

One scenario that we end up with is a Match live events service where people pick their date ideas on Date Spark, and Match organizes the date on their behalf. No organizers to manage, it all happens on Match.com, so it scales.

Or what about self-organizing group dates? I propose an event, and invite lots of people from Match to the event, in effect making me an event planner and matchmaker. I like this idea much more than paying some woman in Texas $500 to basically match me with other Match members #valuepropositionfail.

Meetcha did self-organizing group dates, that was a tremendously great idea, but alas, Meetcha, which was sold last year to Lavalife, doesn’t even exist anymore .

Maybe Date Spark/ Events will only be available to paid subscribers (is Date Spark available to free members?).

Perhaps Match is out to monetize the entire event timeline. pulling revenue from subscriptions as well as from event venues. That seems like a stretch, unless they have a third party who takes care of the details behind offering Date Deals with thousands of merchants. There’s money there, but its like fracking, a difficult and potentially poisonous process if they screw it up.

Or is Match simply going to use the PR machine to promote Date Spark itself? am I over-thinking things too much here? That is a distinct possibility.

What about Crowded Room? Is that the mobile part of live events in Match’s Big New Thing? Does anyone reading this know what Crowded Room is, or even care?

Long odds are that the new service is some sort of video dating, another Match feature from a decade ago that they shut down. They should have kept video introductions going, another rare poor decision on Match’s part.

But the bowling balls, that alludes to live events, not digital. “change the way singles connect, meet, and date- online and offline.” that makes me think of matchmakers or friends matching friends. How does a live event change how we meet online? That doesn’t make any sense, yet.

Currently, Matchlive.com redirects to Match.com. Keep an eye on it.

Thats enough prognostication for one day. What do you think Match is going to announce on Monday?

Related posts:

1. JDate live events
2. Live Events making a comeback
3. Matchlive events ground to a halt?

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.

No related posts.

SpeedDate.com has announced real-time chat for their iPhone/ iPad dating app. With over 10 million users, SpeedDate dwarfs all over video-dating services in terms of sheer size. Usual caveat applies that there are not 10 million people online when you log in, only that 10 million people have created accounts, which is why the site appears pretty sparse when you limit search to your local area. Still, its a neat service used by a lot of people. Just wait until Facebook starts doing video, that is going to be *really* interesting to watch how they roll that out.

I had lunch yesterday with someone who knows mobile space intimately. Our discussion about mobile signups is reflected in the statistic that over the last six months, SpeedDate Mobile has accounted for over 30% of all new users.

Besides Woome, SpeedDate basically created and now owns the online speed dating marketplace in a few short years. Surprising that HurryDate didn’t try this, but Spark Networks, you know, kind of in a rut the last few years. Now SpeedDate’s revenue dwarfs HurryDate and a lot of traditional dating sites

Some top-10 dating site is going to buy SpeedDate, but who?

No related posts.

DateBid, the webcam auction-style dating game on Facebook, today announced the company has partnered with Betsy Russell, star of the upcoming film SAW3D, to give die-hard fans the opportunity to bid on a webcam date with the celebrity.  The winning bidder will receive a 10-minute video chat with the actress and all proceeds from the auction will be given to Going Out by Going In the charity of Betsy Russell’s choice.

Bidding on hot movie stars for charity is great, a nice promotional tie-in for Date Bid.

However, I’m not a big fan of bidding on people for dates online. I know all about leaderboards and buying your way up them, but something about paying to speed date someone online just doesn’t do it for me. Plenty of people disagree, but most of these bid-to-date/view sites are too close to the videochat camgirls doing porn. DateBid claims 700,000 profiles, thats a lot of people looking to get paid to go on online dates.

If you like casual dating on Facebook, check out Datebid. Let us know how it went.

No related posts.

By now everyone knows about the wild-west nature Chatroulette, where you are just as likely to be greeted by a guy playing guitar as you are thousands of naked people doing all sorts of bizarre stuff.

There are scores of clone sites which have tried to capture on the media frenzy surrounding Chatroulette, and now there is one more.

ChatVille is a brand new Facebook game that combines the best elements of chatroulette with the gaming and viral mechanics of apps like Farmville.

ChatVille let’s you video chat with random Facebook users in a safe environment while earning compliments, unlocking badges, and leveling up through positive experiences with other users. You can also video chat with all your Facebook friends for the first time ever right from the Facebook website and post screenshots of your ChatVille adventures to Facebook albums.

Your interactions are tied to your Facebook account under the hood so there are actionable consequences for inappropriate behavior. We’ve also developed a proprietary system for weeding out the bad apples quickly and permanently.

This is exactly what Chatroulette needs to clean up it’s act, but one has to wonder what happens when the experience is squeaky clean and tied to your Facebook account. Part of what makes Chatroulette so much fun is the breadth of experiences available on the site, ranging from the sublime to the disgusting and everything in between.

Steve Shapiro, CEO of Digsby says that Chatville was built by the same team that created Digsby, the desktop app that now helps more than 2.5 million users manage over 6 million IM, email, and social network accounts from one application.

Check out ChatVille on Facebook.

Related posts:

1. Chatroulette Brings in the Clones
2. Forget Twitter, Chatroulette Is The Hottest New Dating Site
3. RandomDorm: Chatroulette for the College Set

This week I’ve been talking a lot about how to prototype a dating site. Lots of companies will throw something up on White Label Dating or Dating Factory and if it takes off, start their own site. Other companies are even lazier and more clever. They create Google ads for a new site which is simply a landing page asking for an email address. If enough people sign up, they will launch the site.

Infomercials are the grandaddy of test marketing. Lots of them state “ships in 6-8 weeks.” This is supposedly because they run the infomercial, take the orders, and if they get enough they will actually create the product.

I’m not sure if this dating-based gaming site actually has a product or not, or if the site is really down, but it caught my attention.

In Dudes Can Pay Hot Girls to Play Online Video Games With Them, VentureBeat says:

If you’re a lonely gamer dude, then GameCrush might be your ticket to meet a hot girl.

That’s the basic pitch of this social networking service, where guys can pay cash to play hardcore video games with attractive females on the GameCrush site.

The site, which launched today, lets dudes view the profiles of “PlayDates.” The profiles say what the girls’ “turn ons” are and show their photos. If you find a girl you like, you can send her a game invite. If she accepts, you get six to ten minutes of one-on-one game time.

A speeddate session based on a game, great idea. This feels like it could be a cam-girl site where the female gamers get paid to play. If not, they should consider that. Lots of men would pay a few bucks to look at a pretty face while fragging each other in Call of Duty.

No related posts.

There is no more effective way to get a sense of someones tastes, preferences and personality than a five minute video chat. Only companies really doing anything with video are SpeedDate, which is getting north of 1.5 million visitors a month and the young kids are using Woome. I haven’t used SpeedDate in a while, it’s $30/month and crashed on me in the middle of a date and froze my browser. It happens, especially on my Mac with Flash, but $30 is still too expensive, especially if I want to try it out for an hour or so.

Today I checked out Chateoulette (Often NSFW). It’s a dumbed-down version of WooMe, just go to the website, turn on cam, and a random stranger is immediately looking right at you, doing just about anything, and I mean anything.

OPW has a post about Match launching an Andriod mobile application. There is another post about Skyecandy, which is videodating via Skype. This has been done 10 times over in the past and hasn’t gone anywhere. Maybe Skycandy has something new in store for us.

I wonder if/when mobile apps will support streaming video? As I’ve always said, an online speed-date with audio and video is the best way to figure out if you want to go on a first date with someone. Mobile apps should be able to implement video chats easily. At home, cams need to be built into a higher percentage of laptops for this to make a significant impact on the dating market. And then there is the issue with people’s behavior. Video tends to bring out the nasty in people.

OmniDate does an end run around this problem by using Flash-based avatars. It’s been around a few years now and I’m waiting to hear some positive results from companies using the service. There has been some research, but where’s the business-case ROI? Are people sticking around on dating sites longer, is there advertising baked into the experience (where the real money is for a startup), are better, more long-lasting relationships resulting from companies using the service?

My SpeedDate time just dinged, gotta go.

No related posts.

Last week I talked with Art Harrison at Randodate. Randodate offers a speed dating application which can be embedded in a dating site or social network, similar to IM/Chat applications like Topicfox and Toksta.

Enter Ning, the social network for social networks, which recently hit the 1 million networks milestone. Ning Apps was launched last week in order to provide social network administrators a directory of third-party services which can be easily embedded into Ning networks, often with only a few clicks. Mashable said:

Today, Ning is about to deliver some of that functionality to their 700,000 social network creators with Ning Apps, giving them more than 90 new toys — think apps like Qik, Twitter (Twitter reviews), Ustream (ustream reviews), Box.net, Tokbox, WordPress (WordPress reviews), Mailchimp, and PollDaddy — that they can use to enhance their individual networks.

Ning Developer’s have access to a handful of applications in the Dating category. One of those apps is Art’s Randodate, which has been rebranded as Speed Dating 2.0.

What sort of adoption rate can we expect for speed dating on Ning? It certainly can be used for meeting people on your networks, not only for dating.

No related posts.

SpeedDate has launched an Android application that offers portable, immediate and 24-hour access to the millions of singles engaged in online dating. By downloading the free application to your Android phone, users can leave their computer screens and be able to message dates throughout the day no matter their location. SpeedDate has an iPhone application as well.

Me no have Android phone, so no review. I’ll try to check out when I’m in NYC, someone I know must have an Android phone.

Cool to see that SpeedDate uses Facebook Connect.

No related posts.