I’m back from family wedding this weekend. My aunt got married at 65 after using several online dating services the past few years and it was the groom’s first marriage, at 65. See, this online dating stuff works if you work it.

A couple of stories to get the week started.

AmericanSingles®.com’s consolidates affiliate programs at Commission Junction.

To make things easier, Spark Networks Limited ® has rolled all of its CJ ccounts
into one. Now you can promote AmericanSingles.com, BlackSingles.com ®,
ChristianMingle®.com, Date.ca ®, and JDate®.com all from the same program.

IMPORTANT: After December 31, 2007, Commission Junction will disable the links!

The Match.com instant message feature all of a sudden started to work on my Mac? Was something changed? I haven’t seen the feature in years.

Veridate Offers Background Checks For Dating Sites

Veridate has launched a new identity verification service that is marketed directly to the end-user and can be used across a variety of dating sites.

More at Online Personals Watch.

Check out the AmateurMatch Terms Of Service.

You understand, acknowledge, and agree that some of the user profiles posted on this site may be fictitious, and are associated with to our “Online CupidsTM”.

Our OC’s work for the site in an effort to stimulate conversation with users, in order to encourage further and broader participation in all of our site’s services, including the posting of additional information and/or pictures to the users’ profiles.

You understand, acknowledge, and agree that the information, text, and pictures continued in the OC’s profiles do not pertain to any actual person, but are included for entertainment purposes only

You further understand, acknowledge, and agree that, from time-to-time, OC’s may contact both free users and paid users via computer-generated Instant Messages or emails for purposes of encouraging further or broader participation in our site’s services and/or to monitor user activity.

The ridiculous verbiage just goes on and on. It’s amazing that a company can get away with this sort of behavior. Thanks to the dating executive that pointed this out.

Another dating executive sent the following:

Spark Network Services (some mobile provider) has patent 6272467 and they are going around trying to extort money from everyone. Yahoo settled on the 5th.

I briefly checked out Ourlikes.com, “Meet people that share your interests.”

Ourlikes.com was founded on the belief that it shouldn’t be that difficult to find people with similar interests. At Ourlikes.com, we allow people to rate specific images, which represent interests, such as books, brands, celebrities, food, general interests, magazines, movies, music, places, politics, sports, television, etc. These are items that describe our actual interests, and the best part is that our members can upload their own images, representing their true interests, so that others can rate those particular images.

I’ve always been a proponent of using brands and bands to give people a better idea about our personalities and interests. Ourlikes takes this to the logical next step.

Militarydating.com looks like a good place for soliders and the people that just love a wo/man in uniform.

Paird is an online dating site that enables you to take part in matchmaking by simply visiting the site and matching men to women or women to men. Found via Somewhat Frank. Reminds me of Engage.com (previous client), which leverages matchmakers to connect site members. Engage has a large war chest and a fantastic profiling system, not sure if Paired has a chance, being so simplistic, there is really nothing to do on the site.

uRadiate looks exactly like Paird, but with actual features.

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The giant pulsating brains over at OKCupid have launched a new site which promises short-notice blind dates.

Crazy Blind Date is a place where you can coordinate a date on extremely short notice. Online dating sites are cool but sometimes you just want to go out immediately, with reckless abandon. We understand it’s not for everyone, but it is for social, outgoing, and adventurous people. Oh, and it’s completely free.

Sam Yagan gave me a demo a few weeks ago and had this to say about Crazy Blind Date.
He’s been thinking about the convergence of online and offline.
Dating sites leave it up to individuals to meet offline.
Good for setting up a date down the road.
People want instant gratification.
Nobody has had the guts to take this on.

Crazy Blind Date launched in Austin last month. This week the service went live in Boston, New york City and San Francisco.

Potential dates get verified by providing phone and email contact information, which should catch many of the potential scammers. I can imagine people trying to set up dates with friends then blowing them off. Time will tell who and how people will use the system.
I like that my Crazy Blind Date and OKCupid profiles are linked together. CBD pulls info from my profile.

If you’re running late you can send a message Cupid saying I’m late. Cupid will relay the message to your date.

After the date you are both asked to provide feedback along the lines of did you show up and were you polite.

I believe that a double-dating feature is in the works.

The signup process

First you select if you want to go on a Solo Date, Double Date or Either.

Next, select the location day of the week you want to go out: tonight, tomorrow or some other time.

Then select the time you are available to meetup.

The next section displays a Google Map and series of neighborhoods to choose from. I was pleased to see that Charlestown is an option. Clicking it highlighted the area on the map. Unfortunately, the system responded that I need to select additional neighborhood, so I added the North End.

Next, the system asked me how often I check my email and how long it takes to get to the areas I want the date to occur.

The next page asks for a freeform description of your idea date. I like this feature, it gives you enough rope to either hang yourself or give the other person a thorough idea of what you are expecting. Creativity counts here. I’d love to see an anonymous gallery of what people write here.

Next up, select age range and gender of your date. Then you select the usual body type, ethnicities, religion, etc.

One final screen asking about other potential date nights and this:

Feeling good? Imagine all the nervous women in Boston right now, hoping for you.

The final step is to create a login so you can manage your date(s), rate past dates, and play with our matching system.

CrazyBlindDate gets smarter the more you use it.

The tongue in cheek fun and playful nature of the site makes you feel like you’re going on an aadventure, similar to a mashup of Meetup and a OkCupid.

I’m not sure how the system gets smarter the more you use it. Guess I’l have to go on a few and see what happens.

Rember, I have no idea what the woman is going to look like. It’s an exciting feeling, and CBD did a good job displaying member photos throughout the signup which are blurred beyond recognition.

SMs confirmation comes next, almost instantaneous.

Then you are asked to complete your profile and upload a file, which is blurred to members until after the date. How frustrating! but it makes me even more interested. Who is going to use this? What women are adventurous enough to take the plunge?

Something tells me it’s going to be Craigslist wierd. If you don’t know about dating on CL, it’s worth going to the site and browsing the ads(probably NSFW).

For the final step of the process CBD asks you a very personal question. Mine was, “Under the right circumstances, would you allow a partner to lick your a..? That was a shock, but then again, this is a service for the adventurous.

CBD is definitely for the 20-something CL crowd as opposed to the Match.com masses. Whether or not it becomes popular is up to the marketing machine at OKCupid. Given the popularity of OKCupid, something tells me CBD is going to be very popular with certain niche demographics.

I’ll report back after my crazy blind date.

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The unofficial Harmony blog is back up. Highlights of what’s happened at eHarmony since May. I did not know about the “Show Hidden Photoâ€? hack that was finally patched.

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The FriendFinder Network has launched a millionaire matching site called Millionairemate.com.

The purpose of the MillionaireMate site is to make it as easy as possible for you to meet ambitious, successful people, using the power of the Internet. At MillionaireMate, you’ll find a community of people using the site as a tool to make connections and find partners for dating, romance, friendship, and a variety of encounters.

This is a very hot segment of the online dating market at the moment, lot’s of competition due to the low barrier of entry for creating a dating sites, especially when it’s built on top of your existing infrastructure.

Looks Like AFF is getting into the “ads that look like chat,” except things get a *lot* more interesting a few frames after I took this screenshot.

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Many moons ago I had a long conversation with Anna Zornosa, head of Yahoo! Personals. Anna, for those of you who don’t know, was CMO at Knight Ridder Digital until November 2005 where she was in charge of crafting digital strategies. Prior to KRD she was the CEO of Topica and Sr. VP at Women.com. At the time, I thought that Anna definitely had the pedigree, the only question was can she outlast her successors? Months later and several conversations with Yahoo insiders leads me to believe that things have settled down at Y! Personals, even after the recent re-org.

Speaking of the re-org, Y! Personals moved to Jeff Weiner’s Network group from Local Markets and Commerce Division (LMC).

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Susan Mernit, the Product development lead for a Yahoo! Personals. Susan was at Knight-Ridder and started a month after Anna. Susan and I spent an enjoyable hour talking about what’s been going on behind the scenes at Y! Personals for the past two years and what’s in store for the future.

When Susan arrived, the Y! Personals platform had not been touched since 2004. The communication tools were lacking and the overall service felt “kind of empty”, more like classifieds than personals.

Search data storage and system architecture exhibited a lack of flexibility and scalability that had to be addressed before the service could grow.

Susan’s goal was to grow and improve the business and product as well as finding new audiences.

First up, a new platform. Planning for the development of the new Y! Personals platform began in late 2005.The goal was an infrastructure which would support a more expressive, richer interactive user experience. Plus, the system needed to be flexible and module enough to enable building for the future.

This next section is for those of you more interested in the technical details behind the new platform.

Y! Personals is built on top of a completely new system architecture featuring state of the art performance enhancements.

The search database was rebuilt. Search is now XML driven, featuring much more flexible data maps. Was using MySql, now on Oracle. Susan’s team spent six months testing seven different database platforms. The improved search system made enabling new search features much faster and easier than the legacy system. The new database systems features *much* faster database calls between databases anda consolidated XML formatting of data.

I was not aware that Y! Personals has had an API all of 2006, but it’s only accessible to affiliates.

The Front End

Susan says the majority of the front end is new, utilizing JSON. One result that users appreciate and advertisers won’t is that revamped Web 2.0 features reduced the number of clicks it takes to do common actions, resulting in fewer pageviews for ads.

New Features

Side-by-side profile comparisons were launched December 2006.

Photos updates: July 2007, featuring 10 photos instead of five. This has greatly increased the number of photos posted. Eight different flavors of photo file formats can be uploaded, up from only one.

The addition of searchable captions has been appreciated by yours truely. Providing a context and description of photos is an efficient way to increase the amount of information that can be gleaned from a profile.

Upcoming Features

New communications tools and interaction capabilities are coming Q4 2007. Expect additional search capabilities and new features through 2008.

I asked Susan about Yahoo! Hack Day, where developers spent a day working on things they would like to see rolled out. (Funny video done for Hack Day, featuring naked puppets, almost NSFW.) Her response was intriguing, saying she supports and endorses the culture of Hack Day and that Yahoo! is committed to hacking and innovation. I can’t help but wonder what features will roll out based on Hack Day.

Given that Yahoo! has such an incredible amount of content, people and services, Susan at the team spend a lot of time thinking a lot about synergies.

Yahoo owns Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo 360, Mash (inf0) and countless other social applications.

The best quote of the interview was Susan saying “How can people have control of their info, how viewed and discovered?” We discussed a few other emerging features that while seemingly no-brainers, Susan swore me to secrecy, so you’ll just have to wait.

Forbes has this to say in article The Algorithm Of Love :

Look for people to match themselves against song lists from Yahoo! Music, perhaps, or photographs from the Yahoo!-owned Flickr photo site. Flickr’s tagging technology, where people mark attractive photos and pool the information, may also be applied to dating.

My take on this at Yahoo Working Towards Richer Profiles. But at what cost to legacy applications like 360? Yahoo did a bold move when they closed Photos and migrated everyone to Flickr. I’m wondering what the effect of new social apps like Mash will be on Yahoo360, most likely cannibalization.

Most embarassing moment of the conversation:

Me: How tightly do you plan on integrating Yahoo Messenger?
Susan: It’s been integrated for over a year.

Susan is also tasked with finding new members for Y! Personals. One would think that with several hundred million members, this would be less of a problem, but when you see the saturation of eHarmony and Match in radio and print, it makes you wonder why Yahoo hasn’t entered the mainstream media market with the same aggressiveness.

Partnership deals

Y! Personals has many different partners, one of the most recent being Beliefnet’s Soulmatch , which I wrote about last year. Yahoo also distributes Beliefnet content through their CMS (content management system).

Note: Here I have taken the liberty of pastebombing various notes from my last conversation with Anna Zornosa.

Whats happening in EU, the deal with Match? What comes around goes around.
Yahoo had a deal with Match in 2000, now they have a partnership in the UK with Match again. Co-branded dating channels in the UK and Germany with global dating giant Match.com.

Other partnerships: Rent.com, Glam.co, Reunion.com.
Yahoo gender balance: m/f even.
Subscriptions: There are some 5.5 million unique monthly visitors on Yahoo! Personals worldwide. 4.5 M US, 1M UK
There will be much more emphasis on partnership deals this year. The strategic principle is to look at each country on specific basis.
Strong partner tools in place.
Factors taken into consideration: what does Yahoo have in place, what does the country have to offer?
France was outsourced.
Relaunched Japan’s Personals last year.

Update: Yahoo Personals has settled with one Robert Anthony over a date-baiting case from last fall.

Thanks to Susan for taking the time to talk to me. It’s not every day that I get to peek behind the curtain of a major dating site.

Subscribe to Susan’s blog to keep up with what’s happening at Yahoo! Personals.

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Now here’s a concept I can get behind. BuyYourFriendADrink.com (BYFAD), the leading online social gift service for buying drinks in bars and restaurants, has partnered with HurryDate to integrate BYFAD’s drink gifting technology and service within HurryDate’s dynamic online dating environment, exclusive to the New York and Boston markets.

A novel idea, after all, who doesn’t like free drinks? A few issues though: If I were a woman, what signal am I sending if I accept a drink from a man? What if I reject it? What happens if I do nothing? I just sent a few friends drinks, let’s see what happens.

You can only redeem drinks at participating establishments. The bar selection in Boston is so-so, and most of the listings say “Coming Soon”.

The $.99 cent transaction fee is bearable.

The sooner this is a Facebook application and runs on cell phones the better.

If you haven’t checked out HurryDate in a while, I highly recommend giving it a once-over. The site is chock full of features, from parties to speed dating to sending drinks along with the usual dating site functionality. I had not updated my profile there in years, so I went through the process of updating things and filling out new profile fields.

Then I found a few interesting matches and hit the $24.99 paywall. I’m sorry, I haven’t been on your site in years, I just spent 20 minutes updating my profile and now you want $25 bucks to email one person? There is something to be said about the pay-to-contact credit model, which seems to have fallen out of favor except at Lavalife.

It’s too bad, maybe she was an amazing woman, and maybe I am feeling cheap, but it’s not going to happen. Maybe I am getting tired of all the people who say “$25 is one night of drinks, isn’t finding that person worth one night of beverages?” Of  course it is, but when you have dating sites fleecing you with auto-payments and flat-out refusing to refund partial months, the idea of spending up to $70 to send one email is depressing. I’m not picking on HurryDate here, most paid dating sites fall into this category as well, especially the larger sites.

My only complaint abouts HurryDate are that they should throw parties in better locations and to remove the circa 2001 javascript code from your profile pop-ups.

Still waiting for my friends to get back to me, I’ll update in the comments.

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I was quoted in an article about the Playboy deal with Lavalife.

Adweek onThe Peeq:

A sexy community where like-minded adults learn from and contribute to a shared philosophy that dares us to explore the quirky, humorous, embarrassing and sublime sides of sex.

Robert X. Cringely gets lightly roasted for his depiction of Quechup.com.

UK dating site First Move has developed dating business cards. TechCrunch says:

 If someone has the guts to approach a person they are attracted to but can only muster up the courage to shove a plastic card in their hand and then run away, they should probably stick to purely virtual meetups where they can be more comfortable before meeting in person. Also, the fact that users have to make a minimum up front payment of $50 to get started with the service is a hurdle so large that I expect very few users to actually try it out.

Chances of success: low. Also mentioned in the article is Aka-Aki, bluetooth-based discover of singles, which looks more promising. Reminds me of Dodgeball, which Google acquired a few years ago but feels pretty stagnant due to a non-existant marketing push.

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Recent PaidContent post about the major Yahoo! reorganization mentions that Anna Zornosa will continue to lead Yahoo! Personals. Three cheers for corporate stability, the last thing Y! Personals needs is a new GM. Have you seen the changes to the site that have occurred over the past few months? I’m amazed they don’t announce these changes publicly. I’ll be speaking with Susan Mernit in a few weeks, hopefully she will be able to shed some light on the latest iteration of Y! Personals.

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AOL Latino and TRUE.com are launching a new dating and relationship area called Amor y Amistad (Love and Friendship). AOL Latino users will have to shell out $59.95 a month for the priviledge of belonging to “the leading scientifically based online dating site.”

Sources tell me that True has a new background check provider and a few other large dating sites are beginning to offer background checks. True won’t be able to say they are the only site offering checks for much longer.

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Time Magazine has named eharmony.com one of the top five worst sites on the web. Ouch, that’s going to leave a mark.

Personality profiling will be front and center in coming months.

Markus gets it right, the Chemistry.com “Rejected” anti-eHarmony campaign initiated the investigation into eHarmony’s exclusionary practices (if reporters copying what other reporters say without understanding the entire issue is an investigation). Once the media caught wind of the situation and the pile-on began, it was clear that eHarmony lost the battle to Chemistry, but what of the war, because like it or not, that is what the skirmish between the two has become.

(Disclaimer: I have done some work with Chemistry in the past.)

Does anyone else feel like eHarmony has been more focused on hardware upgrades than media relations and PR this year?

There is something to be said about keeping your mouth shut and focusing on taking over a large portion of the online dating market, which eHarmony has accomplished brilliantly in a few short years, leaving the majority of the online dating industry to fight over the precious few daters that pay for the privilege of belonging to a date-warehouse.

“No comment” has always been the party line at eHarmony in regards to the whole pro-Christian/anti-gay allegations. Why open the company to the scrutiny of the media and public when there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made? The problem for eHarmony now is that they have no choice in the matter. High-powered PR operatives experienced with damage control are in place and certainly putting together a response, be it marketing-focused or in the courts. Make no mistake, eHarmony brought this on themselves. Bringing this courtside would probably do more harm than good for both parties, especially Chemistry, which is the new kid on the block and can’t afford the distraction at such a critical time in the company’s lifecycle.

Eharmony has established itself in the dating market, but at what cost to singles?

Eharmony is certainly going to feel the sting of the Chemistry.com ad campaign, which if they play their cards right, will be worth much more than the $12 million ad campaign which put the “Rejected” ads in front of prime time viewers on shows like The Office.

You have to give it to Chemistry, those ads are compelling, funny and make you think, which is a lot more than I can say for any other online dating ad I’ve seen on tv.Yahoo! Personals France has dome some pretty interesting ads, but those are, a bit too French for the American market.

The interesting thing is that it doesn’t matter how many people are on Chemistry or what their test is like. Is it demonstrably more efficient than the eHarmony test? Who knows? I’ve spend time with Helen Fisher, who created the test for Chemistry, and I like her basis for the test, but when it comes to results, the jury is still out.

Food for thought: Imagine how popular eHarmony would be if they came out with a 50-question test for those currently excluded.

Further reading: Time did a piece, Is eHarmony Biased Against Gays? back in June. Or, as usual, Google is your friend.

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