Stardate 2003, Mark Zuckerberg in an Instant Message.

Check this site out: www.harvardconnection.com and then go to harvardconnection.com/datehome.php. Someone is already trying to make a dating site.

Via Business Insider.

I have to say that I am quite concerned over the recent Facebook privacy issues. Years ago I wrote a number of posts about the need for a secure cloud containing our personal data that is accessible to third-party websites and web services. I was basically talking about Facebook Connect and the social graph.

I want to be able to expose certain pieces of information to certain parties based on context and have full control over what is shared, how and it’s shelf-life. It pains me to see how Facebook, ever-intent on monetization, is pulling all sorts of sketchy moves to control and monetize your data. I still think that Facebook is the best source of dating profiles, but the privacy issues and data ownership problems continue to worsen.

See DataPortability Project, Open Identity Exchange and Jason Calacanis’ recent blog post, The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying your Hand.

Related posts:

1. Dating Industry Circa 2003
2. Facebook Privacy Enhancements Good for Dating
3. Facebook First Big Site To Really Embrace OpenID

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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It will soon be possible to compare the performance of online dating search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12. Via Tech Crunch.

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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 while back, Facebook came up with the United States Gross National Happiness. measurement.

When people in their status updates use more positive words–or fewer negative words–then that day as a whole is counted as happier than usual.

The graph contains several metrics. The first, GNH, represents our measure of Gross National Happiness. The other two, Positivity and Negativity, represent the two components of GNH: The extent to which words used on that day were positive and negative. Gross National Happiness is the difference between the positivity and negativity scores, though they are interesting to view on their own.

People post happier status updates around Holidays, which have their own negative rating as well (people who don’t like the holidays, Mother’s Day, etc.)

On Valentine’s Day, Facebook posted Relationships and Happiness, posing the question, Does having that someone special really make us happy?

People who are in a relationship seem less happy compared to married folks, but there is less variation in both positivity and negativity amongst married people.

People who do not disclose their relationship status are about 50% more negative than everyone else…. About 30% of women and 40% of men on Facebook are listed as single.

Let’s say that Facebook has approximately 100 million singles. That’s the same number of singles in the US. Can we use these rough estimates to predict how many singles will use Facebook to find a date? I don’t have singles-per-country data at hand, but I wonder if the 30% number holds true around the world.

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If competition from Yelp, Gowalla and other location-based checking services wasn’t enough, Facebook Is Working On A Foursquare-Killer. I am an avid Foursquare user (Superuser status) and so are several dating industry executives, judging by the number of Miami Convention Center and Royal Palms Hotel checkins I witnessed while in Miami Beach.

It was only a matter of time before Facebook got into the LBS game. Facebook is continuously morphing from a destination to to platform, just look at the apps ecosystem, Facebook Connect and email connectivity changes coming soon.

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This was a big week for social gaming and mobile billing companies. Back in June at iDate LA, several people brought the social gaming and mobile billing markets. It looks like the sector is about to get cleaned up,

Zynga CEO Mark Pincus: “I Did Every Horrible Thing In The Book Just To Get Revenues”

Continued Action Against Deceptive Ads

Are social gaming offers scamming users? A detailed analysis of Techcrunch’s Scamville article.

Facebook ad API looks interesting.
Facebook Facial-Recognition Tagger Goes Live. This is really cool.
New Koobface Component Imitates Facebook User. The Koobface botnet has pushed out a new component that automates the following routines:

• Registering a Facebook account
• Confirming an email address in Gmail to activate the registered Facebook account
• Joining random Facebook groups
• Adding Facebook friends
• Posting messages to Facebook friends’ walls

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This is from a friend of mine, Ms. Matched, who’s blog is full of hilarious dating hi-jinx.

Cheating 2.0: New Mobile Apps Make Adultery Easier

A new report from click fraud tracker Click Forensics (via PaidContent) says click fraud rates have declined nearly 25 percent over the last year. The average click fraud rate was 12.7 percent last quarter, down from 16.2 percent during the same period a year ago.

Lab Watches Web Surfers to See Which Ads Work.“Everybody is still shooting in the dark,” he said. “We’re trying to turn on the lights.”

U.S. Census Bureau Facts for Features: Leading up to Unmarried and Single Americans Week Sept. 20-26, 2009. Some good stats.

10 Powerful Ways to Target Facebook Ads Every Performance Advertiser Should Know.

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My neighbor Leah Busque founded RunMyErrand. We see each other often at Zume’s, our local coffee shop. Leah is back from the Facebook fbFund Rev competition for a few days and she told a fun story about what’s its like working out of the original Facebook offices for the summer. fbFund Rev is a contest to pick 20 organizations building Facebook-related social media applications for a 10-week company-building incubator program at the company’s Palo Alto, CA, offices. The companies selected for fbFund Rev summer session will receive investments of up to $100,000 from Facebook. Did any dating startups attempt to participate in the fbFund this year?

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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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