Fred Wilson is Twitter’s top investor. He mentioned that he thinks Twitter should bring core features in-house. There is a lot of deciphering of Fred’s comments because he is on Twitter’s board and yet he says he is speaking for himself, but the writing appears to be on the wall. All of those companies building applications and services based on the Twitter API are on alert and could face extinction if Twitter decides to replicate their work in-house. A nicer outcome would be for Twitter to acquire companies like Tweetdeck, a popular desktop Twitter client.

And on the same day, Inside Facebook, says Will Facebook Start Investing More in Its Own Apps Again?

Snip…

two years ago Facebook created the “fbFund,” a seed-stage grant program (in year one) that became an investment incubator (in year two) designed to cultivate startups building rich social applications congruent with Facebook’s vision. Looking at the types of things fbFund chose to fund and incubate gives you a sense of the diversity of applications Facebook hopes will thrive in the long run on the Facebook Platform:

• Commerce (RentMineOnline, RunMyErrand, Workstir)
• Communication Tools (GroupCard, NutshellMail, Plancast)
• Content/Media Discovery (Navify, Photos I Like, Sortuv)
• Dating (Thread)
• Faith (MyChurch)
• Fashion (Weardrobe)
• Games (HitGrab, Funji, Gameyola, Paradise Paintball)
• Health and Fitness (RunThere)
• Marketing Services (Wildfire)
• Non-Profit (Samasource, Vittana)
• Publishing (Networked Blogs)
• Security (Life360)
• Travel (TravelBrain)
• Wedding (Weddingbook)

This list represents a diversity of web apps that Facebook hopes access to the social graph can fundamentally improve versus existing solutions. While Facebook has only built core applications (like Photos and Events) itself, it’s relying on the developer community to build the apps that fulfill this vision by building sustainable businesses in many of these areas.

The Facebook stuff is from Inside Facebook Gold, Inside Facebook’s new data and analysis membership service tracking Facebook’s business and growth. In addition to monthly data updates, Inside Facebook Gold presents weekly in-depth analysis articles exploring the most critical developments impacting the future of the Facebook ecosystem. Click here to learn more.

Notice the Dating category, where Thread was the anointed leader. Thread has around 25,000 monthly visitors at Thread.com. I see the website has gone through a redesign. I liked the old look better, but that’s progress in some people’s eyes.

SNAP, makers of Are You Interested, has 626,980 daily active users. Zoosk has only 453,853 but has around 2.5 million monthly visitors to Zoosk.com. The AYI website has about 100k visitors per month. I guarantee these numbers are low and as I triangulate them with various Facebook application measurement services I’m even more convinced this is so, but that’s what we have access to right now.

Zoosk bailed on Facebook and moved everyone to their own url, then got slaughtered in recent months when Facebook took away notifications. AYI is basically floating along doing it’s thing, making money but appears to be pretty much in neutral.

It’s disappointing to see that Thread is barely moving the needle. They worked at Facebook HQ all summer, got some money and appear to be talented folks, yet the service is pretty much at a standstill.

In fact, I see that the Thread Facebook page points to Thread.com. They don’t even have a Facebook application anymore? What does the fbFund think of this? Online dating is a billion dollar a year industry, and Facebook funds a startup that doesn’t even have a Facebook application?

In any event, dating remains a category that Facebook should be interested in capitalizing in, although there are other markets far larger than dating that they are most likely focusing on first. Ticket sales for example.

I refuse to believe that I am off the mark in saying that Facebook is going to be the de-facto way to meet singles. It just may take longer than we expected.

Any other cool Facebook dating apps I should know about?

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This is an April Fools joke but in reality its no joke at all.

Facebook is looking to get into the dating game, and it’s turning to Zynga for help.

The gist of the new product? Dubbed ‘Relationships’, Facebook is going to soon offer a section of the site dedicated to helping users meet potential romantic partners. To do that, the company has been working with Zynga over the last four months to develop games that “synthesize romance and foster relationships through social gaming mechanics”, helping users flirt and get to know each other using Farmville-like games to help break the ice.

In the post, Facebook says that it will look at the profiles of your previous boyfriends/girlfriends to determine the personality traits you’re attracted to most, and that it will also use advanced photographic analysis to figure out your preferred facial structure and body type. In an attempt to quell privacy concerns before they begin, Facebook notes that all of this is done automatically, and that at no point are employees allowed to view these reports on your innermost psyche. How reassuring.

This is entirely plausible, it’s only a matter of time. Nice one from TechCrunch.

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Not only are there hundreds of millions of singles on Facebook, pretty soon you will be able to find them via Facebook or third-party geo-location services.

The reality is that while Foursquare and Gowalla and Brightkite have well-established user bases and have built out many features — and arguably benefit from focusing on doing a single thing well, as opposed to being a hydra-headed monster like Facebook — there is too much fragmentation in the market for the current state of affairs to continue. Already, services such as Check.in (from Brightkite) are emerging to try and bring some semblance of order to it all, and others such as Digg architect Joe Stump’s SimpleGeo are providing tools that any company can use to add location-based features.

Read what Matt Ingram has to say in Will Facebook be the One Ring for Location? for more.

How about Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically.This makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in. That is troubling if it’s not clearly explained and easily managed by users. If it’s done well, it could be great news for dating sites who could get basic information to target visitors and help convert them into members and subscribers.

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A new Facebook dating application has launched called SecondLove (link to Fan page).
The folks at SecondLove were nice enough to describe the application and compare it with Zoosk and Thread.
According to our application description:

“SecondLove connects you with singles from across the world. It gives you excellent quality free online dating experience on Facebook.”

We make it simple and easy for millions of singles to find love on Facebook. The process is quite straight forward:
1. Facebook users ‘install’ SecondLove and create a basic dating profile. Later they can add more details if they want.
2. They can search their potential love using basic or advanced search
3. Users can send messages or winks to others to express their interest
4. Users can also add certain members to their ‘Hot favorites’.
5. SecondLove users can also report other users.

SecondLove is different from Zoosk and Thread in certain ways.
1. Thread is built on the concept of connecting a user with ‘friends-of-friends’, and thus limiting them to a narrow target. We bring the traditional online dating to Facebook in its simplest form. People create a short profile and they can start searching and flirting with other user in no time.
2. SecondLove has more light and clean user interface as compared to Zoosk. Conceptually SecondLove is similar to Zoosk, except that its more simple and only available on Facebook platform.
3. SecondLove tries to blend its user interface as similar to Facebook as possible, where as Zoosk has quite ‘odd’ user interface which doesn’t blend at all with Facebook. Thread is a independent Facebook Connect site, so its a different bread in that sense when compared to Zoosk and SecondLove.

At the moment, we don’t show any ads in SecondLove .We are focusing on better consumer experience and building the user base.

There you have it. Another Facebook dating application. Go get yourself a date.

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Ed note: I’ll be offline for about a week starting Wednesday 7-29, taking a cross country road trip.

TechCrunch has the highlights of the recent Facebook privacy changes. I’m not talking about the “Can we use your photo in our ads” situation, but how Facebook knows their privacy controls are too complicated and confusing and is implementing features like Transition Tool to make it easier for people to controls who sees what in their profile.

Facebook has to find the delicate balance between user privacy demands and wanting as much information to be publicly searchable and viewable – the more you do that ends up in your activity stream, the more people will click links to apps and other items, increasing the viral nature of Facebook overall.

Perhaps creating a dating network as opposed to a regional network would be helpful. Networks would correlate to particular niches, and be more like tags. There would have to be some way to aggregate tags like straight, LA, runner, kayaking and turn them into a meta-group. Actually, this seems a lot like Matchmaker.

Another baby-step closer to Facebook becoming the largest dating site in the world.

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Let’s say a single person wants to try out a handful of dating sites, kick the proverbial tires to see which one performs best for their certain circumstances — geographic location, age, sexual orientation, niche, etc.

Insanity is often defined as “Repeating the same behavior & expecting different results.” While not insane, filling out a dating site profile on multiple sites is annoying, time consuming and people usually fill out the bare minimum amount of personal information necessary to create an account. this is not great for them, and dating sites get clogged up with 1/2-completed profiles, not good either.

All of our personal information is already on Facebook, which is slowly giving third-parties access to our data. This is a win-win-win situation all around. Completed profiles, more people signing up, dating sites perceived as more useful and Facebook gets access to more personal information, which will be useful (we hope), when they figure out how to do target-marketing to members based on their profiles.

To that end, last week Facebook announced the Facebook Open Stream API.

The home page design centralizes the stream of information that tells you what’s going on right now in the world around you. With the Facebook Open Stream API users will be able to use applications to read and interact with their stream, anywhere. As a Facebook developer you’ll also be able to access the stories you’ve published into the stream and display them in your application, whether it’s on a mobile device, Web site or desktop, for users however you choose.

…To enable developers to access the stream, we’ve built the Facebook Open Stream API in part using the emerging Activity Streams standard.

We’ve also created robust new APIs called stream.get and stream.publish and new FQL tables that enable you to directly access the stream. With these new methods, you can access the stream on behalf of a user and then display the content in the manner most relevant for the user experience. You can filter, remix, or display the stream however you choose, wherever you choose. In addition, through other API methods, users can publish back into the stream, add comments, and even ‘likes’ to any stream item through any interface that publishes to the stream.

The Activity Stream is the first bit of information Facebook is making accessible to developers. While this doesn’t appear to include access to photos and the data in the Info tab, Facebook realizes that it’s quickly becoming *the* place for people to enter in their information and is making great strides towards becoming the center of our online universe. The privacy and legal issues are a bear to understand, much less manage, but it’s getting there.

Match recently rolled out an activity stream, which is a pseudo Activity Stream. To tell the truth I was mildly surprised at this. It’s a good start but they need to keep improving the feature to make it truly useful.

I don’t know when its going to happen, but sometime in the future I hope that when singles land on a dating site they will be able to click a button, read a Terms of Service and have their dating profile populated with their Facebook data.

The impact of this will be enormous. More people will join dating sites, profiles will be more dynamic and robust and dating sites will have deep connectivity with social networking sites. What’s not to like?

I would love to work with any dating sites who are considering the future of integrating Facebook data with their systems. I have lots of great ideas, some general strategies mapped out and have been talking with several talented Facebook developers about how to go about making all of this happen.

Developers, you’ll want to read Using the Open Stream API to get a handle on the plumbing behind the libraries.

Dating site owners should be at least marginally aware of what’s coming down the pike and how it will impact how you run your business. I’m happy to provide my perspective and insight.

LA Times has a nice high-level overview of the Facebok Open Stream.

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Facebook had announced a whole slew of changes, including improving the ability to share and connect, pages for public figures and organizations

I was pleased to see the heading “The Social Graph and The Stream”, as I have been championing the concept for years.

TechCrunch, Facebook’s Response to Twitter:

Facebook is also speeding up the updates that populate the news feeds on everyone’s personal page. Before, these would be updated every 10 minutes or so. Facebook’s introduction of real-time updates and a one-sided follow system mimics Twitter’s functionality.

New home page is live, featuring new filters to help prioritize your attention as well as upload features and a bunch of other stuff.

Very exciting, non? Please online dating industry, PAY ATTENTION to what Facebook is doing.

Remember when everyone started saying that paid dating was going the way of the Dodo bird when free dating sites started gaining traction? Guess what, there is a chance that Facebook could overtake free dating sites if the right company builds a bolt-on dating site infrastructure onto Facebook.

Why would I go to your bare bones niche site with 2,500 people on it when I can carve out my own niche on a site of 175 million people. It just doesn’t make any sense anymore.

What we’re seeing from Zoosk and Are You Interested is Act 1. Expect it to take a few years for the traction and hype to catch up.

This is why I have stopped offering my hourly calls and designed Online Dating Startup Bootcamp. Details to come, but suffice to say, I’m going to be much more particular about working with dating site startups. If you want to build dating site on Facebook, I’m all ears.

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Poking around Facebook while watching football and waiting for roads to be plowed. Here are the Facebook dating Applications, Pages and Groups and I’ve come across. Many of the applications have absolutely nothing to do with dating.

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