Online Dating Insider

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Online Dating Insider delivers cutting-edge insight and commentary on all aspects of the online dating industry. Topics include industry news, site reviews, emerging trends, analysis of dating site features, discussion about safety safety, finance and other issues important to the online dating market. Don’t miss our Tools & Services directory, useful to anyone running dating [...]

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I received an email from 15minutedate.com. It’s a blind date, scheduled for Sunday night at 12 am. Who schedules a meeting then?
All the site says is “Match ID 42�. Waiting for me to confirm.
Why would I stay up until midnight to have a videochat with what at this time I would categorize as a [...]

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This really should be subtitled “How To Build a Dating Site Part IV.”

I will treat dating sites with respect when they do the same for their members. I try hard to say nice things about the industry, but it’s difficult, and I am generally a positive person.

Dating sites think singles are sheep with credit cards [...]

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CTO’s IT Managers and CFO’s may want to take a look at Media Temple’s new Grid Server. I use Media Temple myself for my personal blog and am happy with the experience, after having 7+ hosts over the last 10 years it’s nice to see hosts begin to offer Google-like server farms and redundancy. [...]

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Pete Cashmore at Mashable reviews Social21, a new dating/social networking hybrid.

Social21 is a better designed Myspace with local flavor. The video uploading feature, blog, eWink etc. are features all dating/social networking sites are implementing.

The success of these types of sites is 100% about marketing. How much are they going to spend, and where are [...]

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Friendster’s recent attempt to patent social networking has elicited remarks from industry insiders that range from “who cares” to careful dissection of the patents’ wording. Friendster’s June 27 patent refers to a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.” BusinessWeek has more.

I knew [...]

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Engage, which is making a name for itself by allowing members to play matchmaker, has raised an additional $5 million in a round led by Advanced Technology Ventures and seed investors Revolution Ventures. The Founders Fund and Josh Kopleman also participated. The company was originally seed funded by Pay-Pal co-founders to the tune of $1 [...]

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GigaOM has details on activity-based matchmaker MatchActivity. I’ve worked with a few similar site in the past and remain somewhat skeptical about how the current crop of services are going to grow large enough to sustain customer acquisition costs. I use Upcoming.org, a Yahoo property for all of this. Millions of events, huge traffic drivers [...]

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Mark Brooks has published a number of dating and social networking executive interviews. His latest is with Mooble, yet another social networking site.

Quick thoughts:

Home pages full of half-naked women will get you a lot of spike traffic. Show me the revenue.
Mooble hope to make money by doing advertising differently, by making it more like content. [...]

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A new trend is emerging where free dating sites add the phrase Skype on their home page and call themselves the next generation of online dating. Let me say it here once and for all. Starting a new dating or social networking site with a core differentiator solely based on Skype or any other VOIP [...]

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