Date.com celebrated its 10th Year Anniversary on Valentine’s Day. Congrats to Meir, Chris and the gang in Miami and Toronto. Date is a favorite client and I’m excited about the future of the company.

Ten years go to the day, Date.com was launched offering visitors a free online dating trial and since then, thousands of singles have found love. In all, over 10,000,000 members have made Date.com one of the most popular dating sites on the internet.

I’m proud to announce that Date has implemented a whole host of changes to the site based on a collaboration we did last year. Keep an eye out for even more exciting developments from Date.com.

Press Release.

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I received an email from 15minutedate.com. It’s a blind date, scheduled for Sunday night at 12 am. Who schedules a meeting then?

All the site says is “Match ID 42�. Waiting for me to confirm.

Why would I stay up until midnight to have a videochat with what at this time I would categorize as a spammer?

They definitely have to come up with an easier introduction system, this is never going to work.

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And here I thought eHarmony was going to launch in Europe first. Turns out Canada is the latest in Eharmony’s expansion plans. Check out eharmony.ca. I bet Markus is quaking in his boots.

Eharmony recently launched eHarmonyLabs, a commercial research organization dedicated to the study of human relationships. eHarmony said the new lab will research relationships and be used to bring new products and aservices to market. According to the firm, eHarmonyLabs has formed a scientific advisory board made up of scientists from UCLA, the University of Chicago, the University of Connecticut, and Rockefeller University. The research team will include five Ph.D’s, led by Galen Buckwalter, the firm’s VP of Research and Development.

Match started some sort of research group in Europe a while back. I haven’t heard anything about it since the announcement. I hope they task the lab with growing the success rate to over 1%. I hope they don’t create more dimensions of compatibility, that test is almost the size of War an Peace.

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Markus quotes IAC Barry Diller:

On social networking: Match.com is our play in social networking…a pure social network site–not that they are of value–no one has yet proved it is the easiest advertising medium. Pure social network is an upgrade from the princess telephone teenagers used to talk on for hours and hours. I do think, however, it is a great promotional vehicle.

Match.com got into trouble because it added social networking, that flirting element and that friend thing. We put all these bells and whistles on the service, and confused our audience…now we have had a turn around.

Diller is only seeing the face value of social nets as the advertising/promotional opportunities. And he’s not hot on user-generated content. Not many of his properties are very viral in nature, although the shift is happening, albeit slowly.

Match didn’t get in trouble for adding social networking, they never promoted the feature and the jump from “I’m singleâ€? to “I’m takenâ€? wasn’t as smooth as it should have been. It was another in a long line of here today gone tomorrow features Match has experimented with over the years. At least they kill off what’s not working.

It’s a lot easier to bring dating to social networking than it is to bring social networking to dating.

More at PaidContent.

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15minuteDate.com is a new free dating and social networking service provided for busy singles that just don’t have time to date and for those who are just too shy to make the first move. By using our service, users will be matched up with a potential blind date based on their profile information in a 15 minute meeting. During the 15 minute meeting, users will be able to meet their blind date “face to faceâ€? if they have webcam, or just used text-based chat if they don’t.

The site promotes that uses a non-Flash and non-UserPlane based technology which allows a single Linux server to handle to up tens of thousands of live video conversations between users.

As a consumer, who cares what flavor of operating system they use? The fact that my date video may pass through their server might make some people nervous.

The service is generally the same as scheduled webcamming. Hundreds of thousands of people do it every day via MSN Messenger, Yahoo videochat and various standalone clients like Paltalk, which is actually starting to take off after almost a decade.

I worked on a similar business model last spring based on Skype which is perfect for this sort of application. This is a P2P application if I ever saw one. What’s always been missing is a usable directory tying people together, allowing search, profiles with photos, etc.

15MinuteDate is a little rough around the edges. Generic templates, poorly designed User interface and navigation and even more damming, I filled out my information and it returned the same page minus my details. Give it a try and leave a comment about your experience.

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1. My Midnight 15 Minute Date
2. Wurbble Let’s Singles Compete For Dates
3. SocialEyes Brings Video Chat to Facebook

I had a chuckle this morning when I saw that Markus says that HotorNot competed with OkCupid. He thinks HotOrNot will move to a hybrid YouTube/dating model. Bizarre that they are shutting down HotOrNot, $5 million revenue for 5 people, but then again, they have to do something, their traffic appears to be tanking.

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Eharmony needs a Product Manager and a Java/J2EE Developer to work on an emerging eHarmony service. I’m not sure what exactly the service is, let the rumors begin the the comments.

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1. Is eHarmony Launching a New Dating Service?
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3. eHarmony Launching in Japan

Open markets are good and I believe everyone should have the opportunity to succeed.
That said, there are too many broken, poorly designed, sad excuses for dating sites out there. I would like to take most of them behind the shed and put them out of their misery because they make my job harder.

The initial *perceived* barriers to entry to build successful dating sites are too low. We need to raise them. I am all for risk taking and starting internet businesses, but there should be some kind of test you have to take before you can roll out a new domain name (no hyphens!).

Why not have a “throw in the towel� day? Shut down your dating site and become an eBay Power Seller. Less stress, shorter workdays and more money and time in the sun.

The software for sale to run dating sites is terrible, with few exceptions. The service these companies provide is even worse. Why would you want to get into something that is going to cost little to build and your sanity to make work and keep running?

Someone needs to start a consortium of developers dedicated to the building and maintaining of dating sites. Guru.com doesn’t cut it. Neither will your nephew or the guy you met at the local geek networking event.

Today when people call me to ask for advice on how to start a dating site, I often mention green energy or pet rocks as a better way to make money. There are too many dating sites which a) never should have been started, b) have no idea how to run an internet business, c) have unrealistic expectations. Is it better for them to limp along on life support or close up shop and move on?
The world does not need another dating site. If you think your idea is novel and never been done, it’s probably for a reason. Sometimes ideas are more fun to think about than execute.
You probably don’t have enough money to make your site successful. Your competition has a bigger marketing budget, and knows where to spend it (and where not to waste resources.) eHarmony spends $90 million a year on radio and tv jingles.

You are not Match, or PlentyOfFish. The chances of this kind of luck and success are infinitesimal, even lower than most dating site visitor-to-member conversion rates.

Most people don’t think about dating sites as internet businesses, which is exactly what they are. There is no “youâ€? in running an online dating site, it’s your IT guy and your credit card processor. They are your new best friends. Who call at 2am.
If you still want to get into the game, congrats, you are either comfortably ignorant or incredibly smart. Either is good, just know where you stand and what direction you need to go in to be successful.

Keep reading and learn how to make it in the world of online dating “social networkingâ€?, because that is what online dating is going to be called in 2008 as the space between the two continues to narrow and paywalls fall down in favor of free dating (which I’m not a big fan in most contexts, BTW.)

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Mingles, a dating site I’ve never heard of, has ended it’s Commission Junction affiliation. No word if this was voluntary or they were kicked.

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1. JLove Affiliate Program Details
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3. Job: Date.com affiliate program manager

Are dating site operational costs higher than social networks? Markus at PlentyOfFish says “operational costs of a dating site significantly higher then social networking sites.� I doubt that 100%. Come on Markus, enough with the hype, or at least back up your assertions. You know your numbers but sometimes they appear a bit too “bendy� to support your world domination claims.
“With the number of free sites exploding.� Where?

Prediction, OkCupid is going to be a much better dating site than PlentyOfFish in a few months, which will start to decline, despite the hype. I didn’t say larger or more pageviews or cheaper technical budget (daters could care less about these things). I said better, as in better profiles, features, look & feel and overall user experience. Wait and see.

That said, the forums on PoF are a pretty incredible resource for singles.

The Comscore numbers that Friender get 6 billion pageviews a month are outrageous. Pageviews mean nothing except to advertisers. Well designed sites log much less page views, often because the navigation is better thought out and it doesn’t take 5 clicks to do something that with AJAX-style programming only takes one.

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