Boston is getting a lot of snow today, tonight the snow shoes come out!

I’m sorry to say that Consumating is joining the TechCrunch Deadpool on March 15. I talked with founder Ben Brown many times when they were starting up and during the transition after CNET bought them in 2006. I loved the concept, turns out the market for the site was just wasn’t big enough, or that CNET didn’t market it well enough.

According to TechCrunch:

The code for Consumating went open source in March 2007 and is available as “clonesumating� on Google Code here for those who think they might be able to make a better go of the concept.

Google Code says:

Clonesumating is the open source version of the code that runs CONSUMATING.COM. It features many state of the art social networking functions including user profiles, user tagging, matching and discovery based on quirky tag combinations, group activities such as weekly photo contests and blog questions, an event calendar, RSS feeds for everything, etc. It is written primarily in mod_perl.

A complete free dating site, just sitting there at Google. Who’s going to take a run at a new site based on Clonsumating? If anyone with the chops takss a look at the code base, I’d appreciate your thoughts on what it looks like under the hood.

Spark Networks Spark Networks(R) Reschedules Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2007 Results Conference Call. That $150 million asking price is looking good to a few suitors, looks like Spark is polishing up their financials prior to sale of the company.

Notes on the earnings call coming up in next post.

Boston.com article about the ongoing battle over online dating background checks.

Choice quotes:

“It’s so superficial that it’s worthless,” said Braden Cox, policy counsel with NetChoice, a coalition of e-commerce companies that includes Yahoo, AOL and other major players in online dating.

Match.com, one of largest dating services, said it had been assessing online background checks for six years and concluded they offered no extra protection.

“Match.com is disappointed New Jersey has enacted a flawed and unconstitutional law and we will explore opportunities to challenge it,” a company statement said.

Even sponsors of the New Jersey bill conceded it was imperfect, but suggested it would at least make online daters more aware of security concerns. The New Jersey legislators involved with passing the bill refuse to return my calls. Figures, I’m just a blogger.

Talking about gaming console innovation, The Wall Street Journal says:

“…Sony Online Entertainment will announce an agreement with technology provider Vivox Inc. to offer a new set of voice communications services for gamers. While online gamers often collaborate verbally on missions using Internet-based voice chatting services, the new free offerings from Sony and Vivox will let users chat with other gamers from cellphones if they’re away from their computers. Users will also be able to employ “voice fonts” to transform their voices into that of monsters and other game characters.

Vivox CEO Rob Seaver was a neighbor when I lived across town in Boston. Congrats to Rob and the gang. I think the Sony deal probably has a bigger upside than the SecondLife stuff they have been doing.

Several people emailed me this video from the Onion, Online Dating Helping Pathetic Women Get Their Hopes Crushed More Efficiently. Someone needs to do a version for men.

Dating Site Aggregators: Mashable on Copenda Lovest. This is going to be a hot market in 2008, there is another player who I can’t talk about that will launch soon. This has been tried many times in the past, but from what I hear, the larger dating sites are more open to sharing their databases and letting external partners drive traffic through an API.

Social Implications of Background Checks: I am interested to see how singles respond to the increasing number of dating sites which offer background checks.

I wonder: How much more willing a person will be to initiate or respond to contact based on if the other person is verified.

Will good looking people need to be verified more or less than plain or sketchy looking folks?

Will men or women be verified more? Will woman or men drive the adoption rate of the other gender’s background checks and identify verification services.

Right now women say “NO REPLY TO WINKS.” Will this change to “MUST BE VERIFIED?” Just how easy is it to get around a background check?

If I can go online and buy an identity for $25 and the identity has a clean record, will I be able to circumvent the system?

I learned about $300 background checks this week. There is a lot of information that can be mined about a person. Right now we’re scratching the surface of what’s being reported. What will dating sites agree is a legal and reasonable identity verification and background check in the future?

Is knowing they haven’t killed anyone enough to put your mind at ease?

What if dating sites put as much money into their matching systems as they did safety and security?

After the iDate virtual pre-conference, I started looking into virtual conference systems. Unisfair looks like a great solution. Hopefully these pre and post-conference services will improve their offerings.
Leveraging social networking sites to drive traffic to your dating site? Check out this list of Facebook dating developers.
Live Speed Dating: The details of the “dates” are not revealed till they pay up or sign up with a paid subscription. At this beta stage, this part is absolutely free. Ahem, people won’t pay for speed dating these days, that revenue is a *long* way off.

I have a review of SpeedDate and Woome ready, except my webcam won’t work with Woome. I’ll post that when their developers figures out what’s wrong.

White Labeler OneSite Acquires Social Platform.

AbleDating is having people spam this blog with positive comments about their software. buyer beware.
Accessibility of dating sites.

Match giving away memberships to bloggers. Where’s mine?You’ve read about SODA, now check out Net Choice.

This week I met with Jeff Strank of Net Party, good times.
On Valentine’s Day I saw a late night commercial for eHarmony. Theme of the ad was, “Its funny how a first date can change your life.” Man, that resonated strongly with me. I was also vulnerable and a bit drunk, so they hit me at the perfect time.
Chemistry fights directly against eHarmony, which instead speaks to the possibilities and not the battle. Eharnony made me feel hopeful. Chemistry is fighting the good fight, but I’m straight, and not a “reject”, so the ads don’t necessarily speak to me directly.
I’m still waiting for Match to fix their Little Black Book Facebook application. It’s seriously broken for Mac/Firefox users and the changes they need to make are very basic, what’s taking so long?

Related posts:

1. Guest post from Dr Helen Fisher at Chemistry.com
2. Friday 6-6 Links
3. Friday 8-25 Links: JDate, Apple, Tribe.net, SkaDate, Facebook

I am back from a fantastic birthday weekend in Vermont. 45 mile bike ride and a Red Sox win to put us in the World Series, can it get any better?

I have a question: What scripts are companies using to power dating site groups?

No related posts.

OkCupid launches Facebook application.

SeekingAlpha on the IAC empire. IAC owns Match.com.

Online Dating Coaches Karin Anderson and Beth Roberts, are appearing on OnDating.TV. ON NETWORK’s popular internet Dating Series, OnDating.TV, brings the Online
Dating Coaches’ secrets and tips to your PC, TV, iPod or iPhone.

New Boonex Dolphin Support site.

SkaDate has been updated.

No related posts.

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, this has been the most interesting and rewarding website I’ve ever been involved with. Before long I started getting emails from various other dating websites and investors and after countless sleepless nights trying to decide what I wanted to do, I put my indecisiveness to rest and sold Mingle² to JustSayHi, a competing dating website. I chose JustSayHi primarily because their aspirations are very aligned with mine; we both want this property to be synonymous with free online dating, much like how craigslist has become synonymous with free classified ads.

This is the kind of guy who could give PlentyOfFish a run for their money and he’s only 25. I love hearing stories like this.

The reality of building a dating site is that it usually takes a lot longer to get buy-in from all parties involved, a solid workable game plan in place and all of the behind the scenes bit-wrangling that happens when building any software from the ground up. Eharmony spent something like 3-5 million to get up and running and on solid ground.

I had to share some inspiration for all of you out there sweating through the development of your new dating sites. Now get back to work!

Related posts:

1. How to build a dating site
2. Mozilla To Build Social Networking Into Firefox
3. How to Build an Online Dating iPhone Application

This is the fourth update to my infrequent “Creating a dating site” series.

I have attempted to compile common answers and my experience with startup dating sites. Much of the content is anecdotal and is by no means a complete blueprint to building a dating site. Hopefully you read this and want to talk to me about helping you build your dating site. Even better, contribute to the conversation and add in your two cents, rebuttals or clarifications via the comments. The best stuff will get added into the series.

I often receive queries about how to go about building a dating site, what software to use how much does it cost. My short answer is that it depends entirely on what you want to accomplish with the site.

What it Costs
The overall cost structure for developing your site depends entirely on what you want to accomplish with the site. Are we talking about a me-too niche, a scalable advertising-based revenue model or a site driven by innovative high-end features? Do you even know what kind of site you want to create?

Much of the cost comes from how far you push the existing dating scripts. Building one from scratch is usually unnecessary unless you have a totally unique value proposition and don’t mind paying people lots of money to build the back-end and administrative functions that comes included with most dating scripts.

For a script-driven site, $10-15k for a programmer, another $15k for designers, staff, programs and other resources and another $20k for initial marketing push. There are countless variations on the theme based on your requirements. You may not want to put that much into marketing, instead relying on viral initiatives or PR.

If you are not familiar with the online dating space or running an internet business, a consultant would charge at least $35k to get the site built and up and running to your specifications. The sheer amount of time spend educating, dealing with developers, writing functional specifications, project management and other behind the scenes tasks is enormous. And that’s for a cheap site.

There are few shortcuts. Offshore programmers may be a bit cheaper, but if you don’t have the resources to build a solid site and have $50k in the bank to do it, you probably should look into other business opportunities.

There are several stories of people starting dating sites on a small budget. Those people are incredibly lucky and had good timing. The majority of dating sites have neither.

Hosted vs. White-label
You need to be able to sustain operations for the six months it takes to get decent traction. Sometimes a hosted solution with a shared database is the way to go, other times it’s best to strike out on your own. Deciding between the two options is what I do with clients and takes a lot of back and forth to come to the solution that best fits current circumstances.

If you just want to get a site up, and don’t care how bland your site is, go with a white-label solution or one of the free hosted sites. White labels will take most of your money but your time-to-market is days or weeks, not months. If you’re ok with giving up a certain amount of flexibility and revenue, that’s a good option to consider.

There are a few players to choose from, including World Dating Partners and White Label Dating (add more companies here).

Dating Scripts
I’ve researched or worked with several of the hosted sites and scripts; right now I’m in the middle of a large Dolphin development project.

My primary advice is to be extremely careful weighing the pro’s and cons of building a site yourself, there are so many gotcha’s and if your programmer is not top-notch, you are going to pay a lot of money for something you won’t be happy with.

(Disclaimer: SkaDate and Boonex are or have been advertisers on this blog.)
SkaDate has a new hosted solution that can also be run on your own server. SkaDate was founded by ex-Boonex members. SkaDate is supposedly a solid solution in many ways, yet their hosted version is reported to be slow as molasses by some, probably due to loading many sites on one server, and the tech support not very helpful. As with all software outfits, your mileage may vary.

After 20 beta releases, Boonex has released version 6.0. Boonex co-founder Andrey Sivtsov has mentioned BoonExpress Presence and Chat as a replacement for MyBlogLog, which creates communities around blogs. I won’t be switching anytime because I am very happy with MyBlogLog but this might be a nice option if you’re already running Dolphin.

I have been working with Dolphin for four months now. Some things it does well if you are looking for a basic dating site, but as soon as you try to get clever, add pages to the signup process or break with the underlying programming logic, things start to go off the rails quickly. Working with outsourced programmers adds another level of complexity to an already difficult undertaking.

One last thing about Dolphin. Once you start developing on a version, it’s basically impossible to upgrade. So we’re stuck with a 5-dot-something release for the life of the site.

A big problem with every dating site script is not the code itself but that there are approximately five decent programmers familiar with each script and system on the entire planet. What’s a dating site entrepreneur to do? Not much I’m afraid.

There are at least 25 other dating scripts, which I would rate in general from poor to average. Nothing against the developers, but when you take the resource requirements, support, developers quality and overall startup experience into consideration, it’s no wonder dating site operators struggle to get their sites up and running.

I say this often but the social networking software scripts and hosted solutions are often orders of magnitude better than dating scripts. I’d like to see a dating site add a payment page to an established social network script and see how that works out.

As was writing this, I received the following email, “I’m trying to decide if we should build our site from scratch or use OSDate or SkaDate.” The short answer is that without knowing how much time money and resources you have, the type of functionality you expect to implement and a handfull of other factors, I really can’t make a suggestion.

As you can clearly see, I remain frustrated with the lack of decent dating site script options, viable developer support networks and documentation.

Links

• Go read Markus Frind’s blog, The Paradigm Shift. He founded Plenty of Fish.
• Read about Sam Yagan.
• Check out the Tools & Services (seems to be a problem with the page right now, looking into it).
• Read everything you can about online dating.
• Join Webmaster World, lots of information about software selection and marketing.
• Remember, Google is your friend.
• The Infrastructureless Software Compan
• Free is a tactic, not a business model.
• Amazon S3
• AWS and your data center
• Monster Muck Mashup – Mass Video Conversion Using AWS
• Digg’s Senior System Admin Ron Gorodetzky on How to Handle Network Growing Pains
• Elgg social networking platform.
• More women on nice dating sites
• KickApps
• Consumating Goes Open Source
• Squid Proxy Server

Next up, promoting your niche site.

No related posts.

Open Personals
Open-Personals is a community driven dating site, gathering people with common interests (forming online communities) and asking them to define their custom questionnaire, for ALL users to take (if they like…).
Be it a specific lifestyle, belief, sexual orientation, interest or characteristic – why not join forces, and write a questionnaire? Four of the the questions in each such custom questionaire are searchable (meaning – when performing a search – you can look for user that answered specific answers to them). This creates a flexible method for YOU, the surfers, to search by ABSOLUTELY WHATEVER matters to you!

Related posts:

1. e-Personals
2. Yahoo Personals Improves Search
3. Yahoo! Personals New Features

DatingRev is an established high-quality personals service that can help you start your own business in the online dating industry. As a DatingRev partner, you will receive a high percentage of revenues for the lifetime of each member you sign up and take advantage of these benefits:

• Access to one of the largest, active database of singles
• Fully customizable to match your brand (see examples)
• Ability to promote your site in affiliate networks (e.g.: CJ, LinkShare)
• Control membership pricing
• Target your site with different site niches
• Real-time member and transaction reports

No related posts.

I was on the phone today with a client who had an older version of aeWebworks (now called Boonex) dating software, which is now called Dolphin. I went over to Boonex and checked out the live demo and thought, what the heck, lets’ see how difficult it is to install.

Disclaimer: Now before people get all worked up, remember, this is an unscientific undertaking and I am not an IT guru, although I am quite familiar with blog software. Nobody paid me to write about this, I was simply curious, as the Boonex posts here get tons of comments from people either very happy with the software, or totally pissed off at the lack of custmer support. I got some grief today about an affiliate link to Webscribble, another popular dating-site-in-a-box. I had forgotten all about that link. Long time readers will also notice the ads in the sidebar. The ads are affiliate links, mostly for clients. They exist for several reasons, I am curious about which get the most clicks, and they provide me with beer money. Maybe sometime I’ll set up sites with other systems, it’s not on my radar at present. End disclaimer.

Initial setup was a breeze, nothing to it. I immediately digressed into reading manual pages of unix commands, which probably doubled the setup time. I could have done everything from my FTP client but sometimes you just like to fire up the command line and get under the hood and I like to exercise my inner sysadmin from time to time.

Step 1: download software
Step 2: upload to web host
Step 3: create database.
Step 4: fiddle with file permissions,
Step 5: log into new dating site.

Time spent: 42 minutes.

Time customizing theme and getting ready for real traffic: Unknown. I couldn’t figure out how to tweak the CSS that drives the themes from within the admin interface, which led me to the Expertzzz forums and Wiki, which worked for a few minutes, then promptly broke:

Cannot complete query (query):
DELETE FROM `boon_sessions` WHERE `time` < 1174515947
Incorrect key file for table ‘boon_sessions’; try to repair it

Oops. Talk about bad timing. If they can’t get links to the support database working, what other problems are lurking just around the corner?

Notes from the install process

Make sure your host has all of the necessary programs and features to run Dolphin. If they don’t, you’re out of luck. It appears that a lot of people b0rk the initial install because they are not paying attention, and then complain loudly in the forums. This is not the case for all install-related issues though.

Read the Dolphin Wiki to get started and have the forum in another browser tab for easy reference.

Permissions instructions are not clear and need to be redone. For latest version 5.6, told to change permissions on directories that don’t exist.

They need to add an alert to change default password. Hint, it’s under Global settings menu.
this should show up in control panel at first login.

Dive into Global Settings menu:view all. Review and make changes. Pretty straightforward.

Fix: “Bread cramp divider” should be “bread crumb” in main Admin panel. There are a lot of spllelling mitsakes in the documentation and administration interface. This can make certain tasks challenging, but not as much as the lack of links to help and documentation from within the admin interface. That’s just plain lazy on the part of Boonex. They don’t understand that the more help you give people right in the page they are working on, the less cluttered their support forums will be with newbie questions.

Some of the admin settings are real head-scratchers and you end up burning a lot of time trying to figure out what certain terms mean.

CSS templates are not writable by default, so you have to manually change permissions, but that info is not readily available. A system that makes it difficult to apply your design to it’s templates is not fun. Witholding judgement until I can read the manual.

Sumitting an event for the event listing page did not go well. After clearing all the errors pop-ups, I submit the event, page reloads back to main manage events page with error:

Wrong date format for wrong

What does that mean? Back to the forums to figure it out, wait, they are broken, so I’m spinning my wheels trying to get the event posted. Why are events listed down to the second? Not all events require tickets or max # of people. Didn’t like my initial password. Decide to move on and add some news items into various custom categories, which goes smoothly.

When I created my profile, the link from confirmation email didn’t work.

Height is in ranges, should be inches or cm.

No default IM? Need to upgrade? Over to Userplane (advertiser on this blog). Will integrate that later. Userplane still references Boonex as AE Webworks, need to change the email templates.

Adding new questions to profile. This is super important for any dating site, and was problematic for me. Changing the search type of the new question refreshes the page and your new question is not saved. No clear description of search type, match type or match field. What does all that mean? Where is the link to the description of these fields?

Orca Forum. Never loaded, the cool new AJAX features are broken, kept trying to reload the page. Perhaps it was because I was using Safari on Mac to load the live site. Maybe it’s great, who knows. I prefer phpBB.

New questions, rearranging modules and theming are probably the most important to new dating site owners, or people moving over from another platform. I may add more to this later when I embed Userplane and tweak the CSS.

So far so good, not bad for a few hours work, but a long way to go to make it look unique and get all functionality rolling the way I want it to.

ModMySite is an active forum for Dolphin administrators.

That’s as far as I got, go check it out.

Still here? Type Boonex or aewebworks in the search box here and see what comes up. Lot’s more insight from people with a lot more experience than me with Dolphin.

No related posts.

What the Relationship Exchange will do for you:

• Design your site based on YOUR desired image.
• Customer care, payment processing and operations are ALL taken care of for you.
• Assist in Marketing Initiatives.
• Provide on-going commitment to site enhancements, performance and quality control.
• Provide a progressive approach to optimize the customer buying experience.
• Continued research and innovation.

What the RE expects from you:

• Sensitivity to the confidentiality of Customer Data
• To be a qualified business with solid principles of business ethics and integrity
• To have a well-documented Marketing plan aimed at building site revenues
• Trust-E authorized (a requirement for data export)
• Customers that are 18 and over.
• To support our vision in establishing a leadership role in the on-line dating industry.
• Commitment to helping singles meet new people in a safe, fun environment

No related posts.

Several times a week people ask me to recommend which dating site software or platform is “the best.”

Being that I am not a developer, I point people to the Tools area as a good starting point and let them come to their own conclusion, hopefully with a knowledgeable developer close at hand.

Intrepid online dating entrepreneurs may want to check out GPLDate, which Rob from ModMySite announced recently.

ModMySite provides help, support, modifications, and upgrades for the GPLdate Open Source Dating / Community Script, BoonEx Dolphin – Smart Community Builder Script (GPL), the BoonEx Dolphin Dating Script, the aeWebWorks aeDating Dating Script, and other related PHP / mySQL based Applications.

I really with they had come up with a better name than GPLDate. GPL stands for general public license, too generic.

The ModMySite contains a forum, which might be a good place for those of you looking for assistance with your site or help selecting dating site software.

Is anyone using Webscribble? I know several companies developing services for dating sites are using Webscribble for their test sites and have been surprised the software is not receiving more attention.

BoonEx (used to be AE Webworks) Dolphin script gets mentioned a lot in the comments here. I’ve not used it myself but I tend to lump all inexpensive script packages together, for good or for bad.

Often one would categorize dating sites in a box as reliable, scalable, extendable or the right price. Problem is you can only pick three, you never get four out of four.

Technorati Tags: gpldate

No related posts.