Online Dating Insider

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Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don’t miss our Tools & Services directory, useful to anyone running dating [...]

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I rejoined the Twitter crowd today after taking some time off from gorging on people’s lifestreams. One of the first tweets I received was from from marshalk at Read Write Web, who just posted OpenSocial Beta Apps Go Live on Myspace.
Marshall’s list of key differences between MySpace and other OpenSocial “containers” is worth noting if [...]

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Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Jay Johns from Iovation. Simply put, Iovation brings a level of security to online transactions unlike anything else I’ve ever seen.
Iovation’s patented technology builds historical information about every computer used to connect to an online service, including device to account relationships and types of problems associated with [...]

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This World Dating Partners presentation is a good overview of what to expect from a major white label dating service provider. For comparison, the White Label Dating Tour.

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Dating site startups should read the WSJ article Small Firms Tap Amazon’s Juice, which chronicles how companies are leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS). The AWS page at Amazon contains information about building Facebook applications on AWS, the DevPay billing system and SimpleDB, which I’ve mentioned in the past.
The beginning of an options matrix starts to [...]

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Many people have written to ask about Google’s OpenSocial initiative, so I thought I would put a few resources together to get people started thinking about how dating and OpenSocial can work together to improve the online dating experience.
OpenSocial defined:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript [...]

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I had a good conversation yesterday with a developer who works with various dating and social networking scripts. I ended up venting for a good part of the call which led me to do some thinking about the status of online dating scripts.
I get many calls an emails from startups looking for the best dating [...]

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News from last month.

Facebook will help other social networking sites to run applications developed for its own software platform, it said Thursday. The company already encourages developers to build applications that work with its site, publishing details of the tags and APIs (application programming interfaces) needed to exchange data. Now it plans to license those [...]

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I haven’t written much about Opensocial since it was released several weeks ago.

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that application developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks (called “hosts�) that choose to participate.

Since then I’ve had several conversations with dating sites interested in learning more about how OpenSocial can [...]

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A developer at SEOmoz built a dating site from concept to launch in 66.5 hours.
The first month of being online Mingle2 had around 90,000 unique visitors. By July the site’s popularity exploded, seeing nearly 700,000 uniques and 1.9 million page views for that month alone. Being the founder (and a user) of the website, [...]

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