Last week my neighbor was playing Vivaldi with the volume at 11 on a Sunday morning. This of course means that he was getting busy. If the music didn’t give him away, I could have figured out what was going on by visiting I Just Made Love, an interactive map that displays the location of people having sex all over the world. With optional descriptions of what they did, photos, search, it’s a tantalizing distraction, at least for a few minutes. And yes, there’s an app for that. This is now my favorite app besides the iBrator and the Sex Offender Database in terms of the best apps to show people. More at the Daily Beast.

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Date-worthy iPhone Applications! Meghan Asha lists off her favorite iPhone applications to take on a date.

Related posts:

1. Shake Or Date iPhone Dating Application
2. Tracking Dating Apps on iPhone
3. Dating iPhone Applications Drive $1.4 Billion Mobile Dating Market

iPhone developers like TAT are coming up with a number of remarkable augmented reality applications. The TAT Augmented ID app enables people to point their smartphone at a person and identity them immediately through a link to a special profile. The profile is contextual, you can set it to “after hours” or “work mode”, displaying only the information you want others to have access to, depending on the situation. Hopefully, you cannot be identified unless you have a profile linked to their system (opt-in 100%).

Would you rather be sitting at home rating random people you’re never going to meet in a Facebook application or do it in real-time while you are sending them a virtual gift from across the bar, conference room, or highway? Imagine for a moment all of the remarkable and stalker-ish behavior this will enable.

I engage is some of this behavior right now through Brightkite, Loopt, Skout and a few other Location-aware applications. But I’m not identifying people in close proximity in real-time. Side note, if you don’t use it, check out Foursquare, from the founders of Dodgeball. Something tells me this is going to overtake the apps I mentioned previously, because it gives people a goal, instead of just yammering on about where they are at any given moment, which gets tiring to listen to after a while.

Augmented reality has the potential to be incredibly dangerous, no matter what the creators say. They simply have no idea how the service can be hacked, mashed up with other personally identifiable information, etc. The services’ positive aspects will outweigh the negative, but only if companies pay close attention to implementing tools to respect people’s privacy in a simple to understand way and learn from user feedback.

Less Orweillean in nature, the Social Pond app is a novel way to visualize your social graph (group of friends, co-workers, family).

Related posts:

1. Augmented Identity App Great For Stalking, Death of Business Cards Imminent
2. Help Identify Dating Site Blogs
3. Stalking by Slider: Facebook Updates News Feeds

The Apple WWDC (developers) keynote today did not disappoint. Ordered my 32GB iPhone, should be here on the 19th.

(Some txt via Gizmodo)

40 million iPhone and iPod touches. In the last year, mobile has officially become a viable platform, larger than some gaming platforms.

Dating sites are starting to roll out iPhone apps. Match’s is nice, so is Skout, Are You Interested, SpeedDate and TrueFlirt. I used them all at first, but usage tends to drop off over time and interest wanes after the gee-wiz aspect wears off.

Mobile dating is going to force dating sites to do better searching and matching algorithms. Few people I’ve talked to want to browse profiles on a phone, even with new web browsers. Give me results, not features.

Safer Dating: Forgetful Mobile Me customers can send a message to their phone which will display a notice and make a sound for two minutes. More interesting, it will show you on a map where your phone is. Also useful for your family/friends to track you down for those Craigslist dates. Nice safety feature that can be co-opted by dating sites. That’s a free feature right there, you’re welcome.

Subscriptions: Today we heard about in-application iPhone payment options. Several dating companies have subscription or virtual good features ready for the new iPhone 3.0. You can use it in magazine subscriptions to renew your magazine (Kindle competition), or buy additional game packs for your games. Or re-up your dating site subscription, or buy the blond across the bar a beer or a song, all sorts of opportunities to build cool functionality into location-based apps and virtual goods. Skout and viximo are going to be all over this. One problem, if your app was originally free, you can’t charge them for an upgrade from within the app, has to be a fresh download. That’s the beauty of $.99 cent apps, people don’t think twice about buying them.

Location-based Dating: Peer to Peer support, which can automatically find another person in close proximity and connect you seamlessly. Meant for games, could be used for dating apps as well. I wonder about the criteria applied to local matches, is it based soly on proximity or can you tap into address book card or some other profile?

What matters most is anonymity. You can know where I am in general, but not down to meter-resolution. This is what terrifies people about location-based dating and hampers adoption rates. This will go away over time as people get more comfortable with the idea. Prediction: casual sex sites will see the highest usage initially.

Google maps can go into any app. Good for finding out date locations, tie in coupons and deals, lots of revenue generators here.

There’s also a built-in digital compass. Only one guy in the crowd goes crazy. “A cool compass fan out there,” says Phil. What do to with it for dating? Point me to the hotties, make me embark on a quest to prove my interest? Very interesting opportunities here. Can you say compass-driven pub-crawl app?

For more on this, read Quests are the new grind in social games, and that is why they are a good idea. Great food for thought for dating sites to adopt social gaming concepts.

Somebody is going to make an absolute killing in the mobile dating space. It probably won’t be a dating site, it could be something like Skout but I certainly wouldn’t rule out a 15 year old kid that will swoop in and take the prize. If you disagree one iota with that you’re not paying close enough attention to the mobile developer market.

Dating sites, it’s time to go forth and start building the next generation of mobile dating applications. You have the hardware, the tools and the API’s to useful datastreams (Google, place data, FB activity streams and photos), the only thing holding you back is your imagination.

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Match has launched an iPhone application. Downloading it now, will play around with it tonight and review tomorrow.

Dilbert loves using his phone on dates.

Fewer Ads Can Boost Click-Through. For the love of God, less junk ads on dating sites, please!

A Pretty Woman Beats a Good Loan Deal …the effect of a mere photo of a woman on a loan offer was equivalent to nearly a 5% difference in the loan interest rate – a huge dfferential in the lending world.

Smart Guys Date in Parallel : I don’t agree but I liked the blog title and the geek undertones.

Talked to OneSite. They power American Idol, Belief Net, NASCAR, NBA, WWE, Univision and Marvel Entertainment, tying social networking functionality into their existing content and Content Management Systems. Now that is some serious social networking platform power. It ain’t cheap but go behold what a serious software platform looks like that scales to the moon.

Someone proposed an edit to my OKCupid profile. I think that is *so* cool. OKCupid profiles are basically like Wikipedia pages, anyone can edit your profile, but you have to approve the edit before it goes live.

I haven’t visited a paid dating site in weeks. I really can’t tell the difference between free and paid sites until I come across a scammer.

I spent $70 on my Serious Dater badge at PlentyOfFish and have not had a single woman email me. These days nobody seems to be writing back on either type of site.

Match.com advisor unveils secret to successful relationships

Online Mobile Social Networking

From the Twitterverse:

Allthedates: Did you know…51% of UK women under the age of 50 have never been married?

OverheardatWLD keeps us up to date on the funny things people say around the office. the customer service tweets are hilarious (but probably not for the customer).

“I’m afraid that we can’t take responsibility if a member decides not to respond to your email sir”

“I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do for you given that it’s not our site, I’d love to help, I just can’t!”

“We assume that people who sign up to an internet based service have access to the internet…”

“In Japan they have a penis festival. The floats are really quite a sight.”

Go see I love you, Man. Great movie.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Insider Links: March-16-2009
2. Online Dating Links for Monday March 30 2009
3. Online Dating Links for April 4 2009

Shayan at Zoosk turned me onto this article – Why Dating Sites Should Care About Virtual Goods.

Eharmony spends $93.3 million in advertising in 9 months, almost twice as much as Match.com.

Eharmony changes its community guidelines and forgot to mention it.

Eharmony buys FertileThoughts.com (old but relevant, still on acquisition spree).

10 Best iPhone Apps for Dating

Online Dating – Blocking The Bad Guys

Great iPhone preso on AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, engagement metrics, etc.

Great presentation about AppStore retention curves, pricing strategies, engagement metrics and more from Pinch Media, which provides developers with an analytics library to monitor app usage in iPhone applications. Thanks Andrew Chen.

Developer Analytics tracks social media applications.

Inside Facebook on Facebook Chat: Latest Stats

Current Facebook Chat Statistics

   * 300+ million chat messages are sent per day

   * 4+ million active channels at peak

   * There are “well over” 100 machines supporting Chat

   * 67% of users have chatted at least once (so about 117 million people)

   * The first message sent using Facebook Chat: “msn chat?”

After one week, a million people using Google’s Latitude service.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Insider Links For 1-16-09
2. Online Dating Insider Links for 10-1-08
3. Online Dating Industry Links 5-3-11

Page eight of the PhotoKast Guide to Building an iPhone App says “Develop for the Seven Deadly Sins“. Guess what #1 is, Lust, which they equate with dating. Page 28 talks about how the PhotoKast “I am hot” section for women is the most popular aspect of their iPhone application.

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I’m not sure how many people are going to shell out $4.99 to take polls and look at profiles that don’t contain photos.

This Valentine’s Day Use the iPhone or the iPod Touch to Rate a Date, Fake a Date or Shake a Date with New ‘Shake or Date’ Entertainment Application. ‘Shake or Date’ Uses Real-Life Dating Stories to Entertain and Provoke Opinions about the Dating Games People Play.

Shake or Date is a new interactive polling entertainment application (www.margometro.com) that poses real-life dating scenarios designed to entice people to discuss and share opinions about their dating preferences. Groups can use the game as a social experience, while individuals can play the game for entertainment and to hone their dating preferences.

How’s this for in-depth reporting: I’m not sure what this does, how it works or why people would want to use Shake or Date. What I do know is that this should clearly be a free, ad-supported application.
I would, however, enjoy an iPhone app that I can shake to make people disappear.

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Hot on the heels of the Google Analytics upgrade, Tech Crunch says Omniture Brings Real-Time Analytics To iPhone Applications. Tracking users is absolutely essential for dating sites and it’s great to see tracking extend to the “third screen” (after TV and PC). Speaking of iPhones, a new iPhone dating application is currently being reviewed by Apple for inclusion in the App store. I’ll have a preview soon, as long as non-disclosure agreements don’t get in the way.

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Dating Ad Network has posted an interview with Kris Covino and Meir Strahlberg at Date.com.

Everyone is talking about virtual goods these days. I’ve been working with Viximo, which provides a complete virtual goods platform to social networks and dating sites.

One thing I’m seeing is that Facebook virtual gift revenue projections are all over the map. VentureBeat says Facebook’s virtual economy may be making up to $100 million this year.

Lightspeed Ventures thinks Facebook will make about $35 million from its virtaul gift store. That’s about 10% of its projected revenue for 2008, estimated at $300m to $350m. For Facebook, these are gifts that keep on giving. The more users who are willing to pay $1 to send digital valentines, birthday or holiday greetings, the more Facebook is able to collect users’ credit card information and create ”digital wallets.”

Whatever the numbers, virtual gifts are a great way to increase revenue per member.

Mixtt Hooks Up Groups for Dating. Reminds me of TeamDating, which had a big media launch, seen in this video.

The Paradigm Shift says dating sites are undergoing Lots of Changes Lately.

New York Times article on the Brave New World of Digital Intimacy. I’m still waiting for dating sites to enable privacy controls so members can display generic information to everyone while selectively allowing vetted people to view private photos and additional information. I learned a new phrase to describe tracking everyone’s lifestreams, “ambient awareness.”

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rebuilding-my-firefox-sidebar-amp-ranking-the-seo-blogs

Louis Gray thinks the iPhone users needs their own profiles:

It’s clear that the iPhone has the potential to actually form one of the world’s largest Social Networks, with GPS support, a contacts list (which are your real life friends), and applications that can access that data and communicate back and forth. With such a network monetization potential goes through the roof! However, there is one thing missing that I think would complete the mix – profiles.

Facebook Sandbox, like an extended profile.

I’ve been speaking with companies developing new ways to solve the age-old problem of compatibility, but not just when it comes to romantic relationships. This article about matching college roomates via an online dating-like compatibility program struck a chord, interesting.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk could be an interesting way to have outsource your dating search. I wonder what dating site Terms of Service say about this?

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