Social dating site Thread appears to be going in the direction of a Zook or Are You Interested clone. I was hoping this wouldn’t be the case. Meeting friends of friends is obviously a the primary way people connect, but more incessant clicking is not what I was expecting. I asked a few friends about their friends today, will be interesting to see what they write back. Thread relies on Facebook’s email functionality to ask people about their friends. This is smooth, but what if FB cuts them off? The entire business fails, at least until they can put a workaround in place. I’m guessing they will leverage FB, build up a few million users, then move them over to Thread.com, just like every other social dating company does once they reach a certain size.

I’m a rookie matchmaker. We’ll see how well I do hooking up guys with my single female friends. I should be able to charge guys to meet my friends, where’s the PayPal option? You think I’m going to just hand over someone’s contact information? This is going to be a thorny issue moving forward for Thread.

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Lot’s of news to cover, rumors to mull over, a tremendous amounts of comments, dating site launches and as always, much love to our sponsors, Userplane, SkaDate, ivoation and Dating Ad Network. Click their ads and find out how they can help you run a successful online dating site.

I had lunch with Ravi @ Viximo this week and then headed over to check out their new offices. Ravi has a great blog post up on his blog, Virtual Goods Branding 101. Viximo just launched their virtual gifting system for Birthday Calendar on Facebook two weeks ago. 500k unique impressions, 166,000 installs and over 20k virtual gifts sent. I see 175k daily active users. Nice numbers given the lack of traction new FB applications have been getting lately. Supposedly 200k daily users is the magic number, when things really start to happen.

New Dating Site urls?

I had a lengthly conversation with someone in China today who knows the Asian dating market incredibly well. I’ll be writing more about this growing sector in the future. The numbers don’t lie, Asian dating is the next frontier and the land-grab for market share is taking off, although it’s a longer-term play and what works in North America and EU doesn’t work at all in Asia. Companies that understand this and reflect different cultural values on their dating sites will make a fortune.

Google launches Ad Planner. I’ve been checking out the Dating & Relationships and Personals Channels. Chemistry.com is listed under Poetry?

Seattle-based Eyealike, a developer of technology for visual search, has put a new spin on its product: finding your next mate. According to Eyealike, it has added a new image search solution for facial recognition and similarity matching. The new feature is targeted at searching social networking and online dating websites, which helps people find potential mates using what the firm describes as “personal preferences for face shape, skin color, and hair color.” Via Northwest Innovation. I first wrote about the Eyealike beta last fall.

Social dating site Meeta launches today. The main focus is on enabling members to create groups,

Meeta.com has created “Meeta.com Groups” for those looking to tailor matching preferences, and as a complement to Meeta.com Groups, Meeta.com Forums allows members to share their thoughts on any internet dating topic. Forums including “Dating General Discussion,” “Relationship Issues,” “Dating and Love Advice,” “Sex and Sexuality Issues,” and “Dating Over 40″ provide members the opportunity to talk not to each other, but rather with each other; thus encouraging member-to-member communication and furthering member success within the site.

Meeta was founded by Brian Rauschenbach, Norman Clarke and Jason Llorin–all Internet dating pioneers with experience from online dating companies including Match.com, uDate.com, Perfectmatch.com, Kiss.com and ePersonals.com. Co-founder Brian Rauschenbach began a career in online marketing in 1996 working for the Seattle-based online dating company, Kiss.com. Press Release.

Cross Facebook with Meetup, add a dating component, add forums and you get the gist of the service. With a massive marketing budget the site could get some traction. Certainly boasts an all-star management team.

VdateOnline says videochat dating is enjoying extreme growth.

VdateOnline remains the only site offering its members free video or photo profiles, instant live webcam dating, video profile sharing, and virtual video dating.

Sometimes assaulting people with features works.

Dating in a modern style compared a few dating directories.

Disabledcupid launched.

Iovation Newsletter is out but only via email, where’s the link to the website version?

This SpeedDate landing page perplexed me. SEO gone awry?

Internet Business Law Services director Martha Arias says:

The International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2005 (IMBRA) does not ‘exclusively’ regulate online dating sites (or online marriage brokers) and it is not intended to protect online-dating U.S. citizen brides. Indeed as its name suggests, IMBRA imposes law requirements on ‘international marriage’ brokers and intents to protect ‘immigrant women’ that may become victims of domestic abuse.

Andrew Chen is the man when it comes to social networking traffic analysis and statistics.

I have a big 7.5 mile running race on Sunday, wish me luck.

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Two big fundraising events in the past week have occurred.

First, online videochat service WooMe has raised $12.5 Million. That’s an enormous amount of money for a videochat site, but after having a conversation with CEO Stephen Stokols I’m pretty confident that they know exactly what they are doing. The Series B round was led by Index Ventures with existing investors Atomico and Mangrove Capital Partners also participating. The new capital will go toward supporting user growth, expanding internationally and introducing new functionality to the site.

With these strategic investments and partner relationships, WooMe is expanding its reach rapidly. Within the first six months of launch, the website can claim:

• Over 350,000 registered users
• Thousands of new users added per day
• Over 4 million introductions
• Over 2,500 speed sessions played per day
• Approximately 15,000 introductions per day
• More than 150 countries represented
• Time spent on the site doubling monthly

San Francisco-based dating site Zoosk has raised $4.1M. The company has developed a simple dating interface for people to get to know each other on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc. According to alarm:clock:

Zoosk has some nice stats: + Founded in 2007, the startup has more than 400K daily unique visitors + More than 1M messages per day are exchanged through Zoosk +3M dating profiles on the network with a growth rate 5-7% per week.

I’ll have to ask Alex if the one million messages includes the act of voting on someone.

The round was led by Canaan Partners and included ATA Ventures. ATA Ventures was also a first round investor in Zoosk along with Amidzad Partners. Zoosk will use the funds to expand its marketing efforts, increase its subscriber base across additional social networks and develop compelling new features for its network.

Raising money for pure-play dating startups is difficult in todays investor climate. Companies focusing on social dating based on inexpensive cross-network traffic from social network applications and video introductions the purse strings tend to open faster.

We haven’t seen the killer social dating app on social networks yet. Snap Interactive and Zoosk are the primary players but their services are decidedly version 1.0 and have a long way to go to be truly useful. If only Facebook would release a new version of their API and let developers have better access to profile data, thats when things are going to get really interesting.

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Social dating site Engage has emerged from it’s two-year beta. As part of the launch program, I received an exclusive preview of the new site from Suneet Wadhwa, the founder of Engage. Disclaimer: I have worked with Engage in the past.

The Engage social dating focus is nothing short of a completely disruptive approach to online dating. I’ve been trying to get dating sites to add social features for years and it’s great to see Engage take the ball and run with it.

Many dating sites are working hard to increase interactivity between members and harness the power of the crowd; I predict that many dating sites will have at least some social features in the next year or two. It’s not going to be the larger players for the most part, as they are too focused on advertising and global expansion to be bothered with actually improving the user experience.

Engage, on the other hand, understands that people want to meet in a natural and fun way. Meeting on most dating sites couldn’t be farther from this concept, with the exception of OKCupid and maybe the forums on PlentyOfFish. When is the last time you told your friends how much fun it is to be on your dating site of choice?

While Engage retains it’s focus on the concept of social dating, the site has undergone numerous changes to bring it in line with what it hopes singles are looking for in a new dating site. This evolution has vastly improved the site at the risk of delaying the official launch for too long.

At it’s core, Engage was designed to be fun and entertaining, because people want to meet naturally, not taking myriad tests and jumping through hoops gain access to other singles.

Most dating sites launching these days are a clone of Match.com or a stock deployment of a dating script. Engage looks and functions differently than any dating site I’ve ever used. They have packed an incredible amount of social features into the new site. The site is highly transactional, combining dating and social networking, the true essence of social dating.

The only question is, do people want to match and be matched online by their peers and can Engage grow the site large enough to be useful? It costs a lot of money to retain top talent, technical infrastructure and fuel marketing campaigns. Chemistry.com is spending over $10 million a year with around 1/2 million members, and that includes the cherry-picking of members from sister site Match.com. This makes the success of sites like SinglesNet and PlentyOfFish all the more incredible when you consider their humble beginnings.

To kickoff the new site, Engage worked with Adaptive Path to build a mental model of the how people use dating sites. On paper the model is 17 feet long. Compare that to the dating applications on Facebook, which were launched in a matter of weeks for the most part. Engage is clearly empire building, as opposed to experimenting with social media.

At the core, Engage has tried to be different from all other dating sites from the start. Initially, profiles were different for men and for women, which makes perfect sense when you think about it. The community aspect of the site was a first as well – encouraging people to be matchmakers as well as members had not been tried on a large scale until then.

In short, Engage is a bit like HotOrNot for grownups, but the site does so much more, it’s a bit daunting to try and explain here. Suneet used the phrase structured voyeurism to describe online dating, which is what I’ve been calling dating sites and social networks for years. Clicking the rating and matching buttons is addictive, at least for a while. Then you start to realize that you are just clicking away with little regard for the quality of the matches. Engage definitely needs to tie in a reputation system with the service. Without it, people will click anything to get more and more points.

The new Engage improves upon the matchmaker theme, adding quite a bit of transparency via new features that make it easy to recommend people to your friends and even people you don’t know.

Interested online dating industry information from Suneet:

• 60% of all men never receive email.
• 29% women don’t either.
• Less people, more transactions/conversations.
• Bilaterial communication between aggressive men and beautify women.
• Most people enjoy a 90% rejection rate.

Engage has gone to great lengths to unleash the connector in each of us by combining dating and social aspect, i.e. social dating. While this is certainly not a new idea, the way that Engage has implemented it certainly is.

What Engage has done is to unleash the viral nature of social networks on it’s own destination website. As with social networks, you can import your address book. If you see someone you think would be a good match for a friend, Engage will contact them if they are a member or not. Engage is relying on this novel feature to draw more people into the system.

I’ve never seen a dating site where you upload your address book. I have over 900 people in mine, and the idea that I would go through my address book and identify all the single people is daunting. But if the service does what it’s supposed to and the people are high-quality enough to warrant me inviting in a few single friends, that’s certainly changing the game of social invites along the lines of Match letting you start a profile for a friend.

Engage says 262,000 unique visitors used its service last month, after two years in beta. As a comparison, sites like Zoosk and Are You Interested have 200-400k visitors after only a few months in service. Such is the strength of free marketing on social networks.

The problem is that most social networking traffic going to dating sites is low-quality for the most part. The question becomes, do you fill your site with lots of casual daters or pay dearly for fewer quality leads?

Let’s take a look at the new features at Engage. This is by no means a comprehensive list, there is simply too much stuff to cover here, you have to go experience the site to get the full picture of what Engage is trying to do in the name of social dating.

When you log in you see Fresh Faces. Fresh Faces is run by a powerful new matching algorithm and it’s the only place on the site where the computer matches your friends. The rest of the matching features of the site are powered by people.

Suggested For You – this is where your friends and others recommend people for you, or people you have recommended for yourself, show up. Shows votes from others, yes or no.
You can suggest someone from their profile page or email them. You can lock out people from seeing your matching page. The other person never sees your Chit Chat about them.

I love the “tag” suggestions. LikeMatchWords but better.
Comments cannot be deleted, which may end up being an issue, but is easy to fix later on.

Suggestions for Friends – These are people who have suggested people you know.
Every transaction you make shows up in related people’s feeds. This configurable “lifestream” lets you control how much of your actions are displayed publically. Some people will find the incredible amount of transparency to be too much. Time will tell how people react to letting it all hang out there.

My primary concern about privacy and transparency on the site is that people who are being talked about are not able to participate in the conversation. Engage likens this to talking to your friends about someone you see across the bar. They can’t hear what you’re saying and are not privy to your interest until you introduce yourself, or are introduced.

Case in point, Mark Brooks at Online Personals Watch connected with me on Engage. Now I would expect good recommendations from Mark, but he he could also choose to tell everyone what a womanizing pervert I am, and I’d be none the wiser. I see this as a big problem.

Your actions on the site are rewarded with points:

5 points for voting
10 points for a comment
100 for a recommendation
250 for an introduction

The points systems is a bit old school, I like the idea of levels better, where you don’t know when you’ll move to the next level. Levels = reputation, the higher the better. I’d like to see a level for matching people that get married. 1,000,000 points perhaps?

Play Matchmaker: allows users to fix-up friends and acquaintances on the site in a myriad of ways.

Social Feed: lets you know what others in your community are doing – e.g. who are they are interested in on the site, who they’ve introduced / recommended to others and how recent dates have gone.

Cast Your Vote: allows Engage users to vote on the best match for random singles on the site, using the power of the community as a catalyst for meeting someone new.

One-click suggestions: allow users to quickly make suggestions for others, or for themselves, based on their initial impressions and gut instinct.

Social Points: these are awarded for any type of matchmaking activity undertaken on the site, i.e. making an introduction for someone in your friend list, or casting your vote on suggested matches. This adds a competitive and entertaining slant on matchmaking activity, to encourage active participation.

Profile page – in general, like Match.

Fixup page – sense of what that person is like and what people are saying about them.

Clicking on friend- shows fresh faces, suggested for them.

About You- your stats.

Leaderboards – points, Power connectors, Movers and shakers, Most popular, etc.

The People page is where you can discuss your matchups privately with friends or publicly. One issue I had with the invitation feature is that it’s a blank box. It needs auto-complete of your Engage friends to be truly useful.

New games such as wingman will rotate on the home page where Cast Your Vote is. You will be able to play Wingman with your friends, getting dumped into conversations with people. There are 6 people involved in a group conversation. I like this idea. No idea if it will work but WooMe does this as well and I love that service.

Various leaderboards let you track your performance on the site. The amount of metrics will keep stats junkies happy.

Cast your Vote: I end up matching people on their horoscopes and who would look good together. Not exactly rocket science but fun none the less.

The social digest is similar to your Facebook Newsfeed, giving you a daily update about how people are matching up you and your friends.

You can lock out people from seeing your matching page. I like this feature. Too many dating sites lack the transparency to be truly effective. Engage just about gets this right.

It’s strange at first to begin an email to someone, only to see the “Add others” option to the email. If I’m going to flirt with a woman in an email, there is no way I’m going to include anyone else in on it.

I don’t like that comments cannot be deleted, and there are some issues with the site being to transparent, in that people can start conversations about you without your knowledge. This creeps me out, perhaps they will change this in the future. A digital version of “are your ears burning?” would be welcome.

The initial learning curve is going to turn some people off, but that is the price Engage will pay for attracting serious daters.

Engage has been around for a few years now. During this time they have landed top-notch talent from Yahoo and Technorati, and Trish McDermott has been with them since the beginning. McDermott was VP of Romance at Match.com, which she joined in 1994.

After several redesigns and little marketing of the site, the time has come for the site to grow through a well-planned marketing campaign based on social dating or be acquired by a site that wants several hundred thousand members and a solid technology platform.

I can imagine a Top 5 dating site acquiring Engage for the right price if Suneet decides he doesn’t want to raise more money to market the site. Or even a large consumer brand for that matter. Engage has done the hard thinking and work and has the patents and intellectual property to show for it.

Will the general public warm up to the concept of social dating in the next 12 months? Maybe all they want to do is be force-fed matches from eHarmony, browse static profiles at Match, SinglesNet and the rest of them. Or maybe people will finally latch onto the idea that having thousand of people helping you find your match can be a lot more effective than any personality test. Nobody knows at this point, but if we look at the success of social networks, it’s clear that people want to communicate with each other, and that dating doesn’t have to be limited to browsing an online catalog.

VentureBeat questions the effectiveness of the Engage approach. I recommend you read their review.

Recently I interviewed Suneet and Trish McDermott of Engage on Cupidcast.tv. We spent an hour talking about Engage, the current state of the online dating industry and much more. Check out the podcast for much more information about Engage.com.

Read the Engage social dating Press release.

It’s really much easier to see the features and functionality on the Engage site iteself. It sounds complicated in writing but it’s pretty easy and straightforward once you have spent some time on the site. Check out Engage and take it for a spin and be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts.

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I’ve been getting a lot of emails from Facebook dating applications this week after signing up for about 20 of them last weekend. Thing is, I deleted 20 applications a few weeks ago because I thought they were breaking things on Facebook. It appears that when you delete a Facebook dating application, all of the people you invited to the application are lost, and you have a big do-over on your hands. Can anyone confirm this?

Reminds me of the iPhone. When they came out I was totally lusting after it, but decided to wait for a while to see how it worked in the real world. I bought mine off a friend at a deep discount a while back, and the first few weeks were intoxicating. The scroll, the pinch and stretch, the poor man’s GPS. I was like a new father showing off my baby. Two months later, I am looking forward to getting a Nokia. The lack of a keyboard is a total turn-off for me, end of story.

Why am I talking about the iPhone? Because developers are up in arms that Apple has the audacity to act as gatekeeper for third-party applications. Either you pass muster with Apple or you’re out of the game. Granted, I think Apple has maybe gone a bit too far with the Draconian “our way or the highway” mentality, but I wish Facebook had exhibited some of Apple’s chutzpah when it comes to allowing and approving applications on its platform.

I would gladly take 25 approved dating applications over the 1000+ plus out there today. That’s not to say there aren’t a few gems in the rough, I just am not finding them.

Engage is trying to replicate what most Facebook applications are attempting, instead starting with a few hundred thousand members instead of 70 million. Engage will appeal to social daters because the people on the site are more serious about dating than most people on Facebook, i.e. purpose-driven as opposed to “oh let’s look at hotties on this Facebook application.”

I had an interesting talk with someone in the media this week to talked to a popular Facebook application developer who tried to do all sorts of leading-edge features in their dating applications. None of them worked. People just want to be voyeurs and click around on their lunchbreak. How long until Facebook turns into the world’s largest casual gaming site?

I am totally addicted to checking out application stats on Appsaholic and am always learning new things about the viral nature of social networks, but from an end users perspective, the choices for actually doing interesting things on Facebook are currently slim. This may change over time, but only if Facebook improves the platform, makes it easier for developers to create compelling applications and does a better job of managing the quality of the applications they allow on the platform.

Related posts:

1. Facebook has 40 Dating Applications
2. Building List of Facebook Dating Applications
3. Facebook Dating Applications, Groups and Pages