I found Constant Content Screening via a question that was asked on LinkedIn. CCS is part of Telecommunications On Demand.Think of the hundreds of millions of profiles and images on dating sites, Facebook and Myspace.

Most companies hire scores of people who approve profiles and photos all day. CCS takes the burden of the task off a sites’ hands, providing content screening services right here in the US. From what I understand they are less expensive than if you hired people to to the filtering in-house. CCS offers a variety of other services that dating and social sites will find interesting.

Pretty soon the machines will take over the photos review process, which will put some people out of work but overall will be better for the industry. Then the machines will do the matching, and then the dating, and we can sit at watch Youtube videos all day like we’re supposed to.

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McSweeney’s has a funny bit about creating your JDate profile.

Looking for:

- A long-term relationship. (But obviously marriage is in the foreseeable future, right? I mean, who are we kidding here? You’ve got to grow up and raise a family sometime.)
- Marriage and children. (Wait, didn’t we have this option already? Who gets married and doesn’t have children? Crazy people, that’s who.)
- Activity partner. (Please. Join a club. You don’t need a dating site for this.)

Children?

- Not sure, but who am I kidding? Of course.
- No, and I’m saying that especially to make my mother sob uncontrollably for days. I’m a horrible, ungrateful child who doesn’t understand the joys of grandchildren.

About Me

Instructions: Describe yourself and your personality. What are you passionate about? Why haven’t you found a nice girl yet, and what exactly attracts you to those dumb floozies you keep bringing to our family dinners? As if we don’t have enough drama without you bringing around Bryn or Joyceline or some other girl with a name we’ll be asking you to spell out months after you’ve broken up with her. What about Rebecca? Isn’t that a nice name? The craziness with names these days. Everyone needs to stand out, name their baby something special and hard to spell. Jerks. (100 character minimum.)

Hilarious.

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Check out the error message I caught on Match. “This persons picture is too sexy to display.” I’ve never seen this before.

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After  week of political posturing, the New York Times says that Myspace will hand over to state attorneys general the names, addresses and online profiles of thousands of known convicted sex offenders who have opened up accounts on the service. More than 7,000 profiles of convicted sexual predators have been removed as well. States must subpoena Myspace for specific information on suspects. A dozen states have done so already.

Seven thousand profiles is a drop in the bucket in relation to the 180 million profiles currently on Myspace. Profile removal is straightforward. These people should not have been able to get on the service to begin with, but Myspace would never have flourished with tighter security controls in place from day one.

The problem now becomes how to implement safety measure during the signup process, which will certainly curtail the number of new members as they move on to new sites.

Me? I’m over on Facebook now. I’ll keep my Myspace account but I almost never log in anymore. Speaking of Facebook, expect big news on Thursday about the evolution of the Facebook platform.

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The first time I remember seeing Tickle was in a New York Times banner ad, where you has to pick the next object in a series of pictures. I clicked through and found I had picked the wrong one, and I was hooked. I spent a few weeks taking a lot of Tickle tests, which in hindsight feel like the empty calories I get from voyeuring around Myspace. Fun, but I could have been doing something more productive.

Then Tickle wanted to be a dating site, so it launched LoveHappens, which Monster spun off after acquiring Tickle. To this day, LoveHappens just isn’t happening for me.

Fast forward again to OKCupid, which is making inroads as a serious contender for the title of “#1 test-driven free dating site.” The sheer number of tests at OKCupid make the eHarmony’s mind-numbing questionnaire seem like a walk in the part. The big difference is that you don’t have to take any tests at OKCupid, but then what’s the point of joining?

In response to the rise of  OKCupid, Tickle has now added member profiles. I thought they had this all along. Now Tickle is more like LoveHappens, which is similar to OKCupid, which is like PlentyofFish, but with tests.

The casual dating market is chaotic to say the least when compared to the calmer waters of the serious dating sites. That’s the difference between free and paid sites in a nutshell these days.

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Over the years, dating sites like Match.com have toyed with audio and video on profiles. Impediments included the need for special infrastructure, i.e special phone numbers to call into, or developing applications to record low quality video from sub megapixel webcams. And who do you know that had a webcam in 2003?

With ever-falling bandwidth prices, I see dating sites swinging the pendulum back to multimedia profile and messaging to increase member-to-member communication, fight scammers and increase the stickiness of their sites.

Several factors support this supposition. Fortunately, adding multimedia to profiles gets easier every year. Flash-based recording and display applets are easily embedded into profiles, which negates the need for special phone numbers, recording and playback systems. Recent Apple laptops come with built-in cameras and webcams from Logitech (slowly but) steadily increasing in megapixels.

Companies like Userplane (ed: advertiser on this blog) and Jangl are leading the pack of member communications tools, and it wouldn’t take much effort for them to offer audio/video modules easily embeddable in dating site profiles.

An anonymous calling company recently contacted me to see what I thought about their new service. Evidently there are a lot of people who have figured out how easy it is to start these services, and while there are various flavors of back-end technology powering them, the user experience is about the same for all of them.

At first I blew the company off. I get these emails all the time, and reviewing anonymous calling services is about as exciting as waiting for your profile photos to be approved on Match. Unless it’s Jangl, which is major coolio in terms of the system and how it works.

After receiving another email from what I take must be their PR department, I finally got around to checking out Jaxtr, a free anonymous calling service that takes a grammar hint from Jangl, and as an added twist, allows messages to be played back in web browsers. It’s G*Number a la 2003 all over again.

I’ve written about anonymous calling overload, ’nuff said.The reason I’m mentioning Jaxtr is that it could turn out to be an unauthorized parasitic service that ends up the Photobucket of the dating world.

If you haven’t heard about Photobucket, videos from the site were recently  blocked by Myspace, who suddenly felt the need to flex it’s muscle when it found out Photobucket was up for sale, according to TechCrunch.

Most dating sites try to strip out anything remotely resembling a url. Perhaps Jaxtr can figure out a way to circumvent this limitation, without partnering with dating sites I don’t know how this would work.

It seems like Jangl or Userplane are much better suited to offering these services. They are technologically proven, have partnerships with large dating sites and understand the needs of the industry and it’s members. Maybe Jaxtr can partner with niche or adult sites.

Online dating is an inherently voyeuristic endeavor which benefits greatly  from the additional dimensions of  audio and video, whether it be in member-to-member communication or profiles.

We’re all tired of staring at bad photos and reading boring profiles. Time for dating sites to take a page from the social networking playbook and allowing members to embed videos and audio from Youtube or other (un)sanctioned sources.

Related posts:

1. The Rise Of An Underground Facebook Market
2. The Rise of Freeconomics: PlentyOfFish and OkCupid
3. Twitter Brings Richness, Depth and Immediacy to Dating Profiles

Jessica Mintz at Businessweek shines a spotlight on online dating.

Yahoo, ranked the number one site, declined 14 percent in November compared with the previous year. Match.com had 12 percent fewer visitors in November, year-over-year.
Match made $80 million last quarter, mostly by raising fees.

Spark Networks will start using DoubleClick Inc.’s online advertising services to generate more revenue from its sites.

Match.com Tempts Voyeuristic Users with New Campaign: New site features include Web-based tools to help craft a written profile and create and download a flattering photograph, in addition to a free “voyeur� section where potential users can check out other singles.
Nice to see Match getting on the profile enhancement bandwagon, again.

Via clickZ.

The work essentially relaunches the service and touts Match’s Portrait Toolkit, which allows users to seek advice (from Jay Manuel of America’s Next Top Model) about wardrobe, hair, makeup and other attributes to make their photographs more appealing.

Great details about overall advertising spend at Match ($60 million annually) and eHarmony($90 million) at Adweek.

Match has bowed a multimedia push introducing the tagline “It’s okay to lookâ€? in ads crafted by independent Hanft Unlimited in New York. The $60 million effort (largest ever) puts Match’s Portrait Toolkit to the forefront, which allows users to seek advice from America’s Next Top Model’s Jay Manuel about their image in pursuit of making photographs more appealing – in stark contrast to Match’s recent efforts featuring TV self-help guru Dr. Phil McGraw.

Via Marketing Vox

In other dating news, Meetic and Enlaso have paired up to offer multilingual online dating. In January 2005 Enlaso announced they were chosen to be the localization partner to Match.com.

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SL Profiles enhanced profiles displayed within SecondLife’s client. The profiles are pulled from SLprofiles.com. The site accepts advertising, which is paid in Linden Dollars (in-world currency.) Profiles can have first life and Secondlife pics, places blogs, ratings and more. Very cool to be able to bring web content into the SL client. Word on the street is that various third party clients will be available soon. Snow Crash here we come.

Technorati Tags: secondlife

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Thomas Technologies recently wrote about profile writing tools. Evan Katz, Mark Brooks and myself were quoted.

Technorati Tags: profile+writing

Related posts:

1. Writing Persuasive Personal Ad Headlines
2. Sponsor Update: Thomas Technologies
3. AnotherFriend.com Launches Thomas Personality Assessment

I recently posted about new profile features at Match. Here is a screenshot of the new profile highlight features.

[tags: match]

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