Many moons ago I had a long conversation with Anna Zornosa, head of Yahoo! Personals. Anna, for those of you who don’t know, was CMO at Knight Ridder Digital until November 2005 where she was in charge of crafting digital strategies. Prior to KRD she was the CEO of Topica and Sr. VP at Women.com. At the time, I thought that Anna definitely had the pedigree, the only question was can she outlast her successors? Months later and several conversations with Yahoo insiders leads me to believe that things have settled down at Y! Personals, even after the recent re-org.

Speaking of the re-org, Y! Personals moved to Jeff Weiner’s Network group from Local Markets and Commerce Division (LMC).

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Susan Mernit, the Product development lead for a Yahoo! Personals. Susan was at Knight-Ridder and started a month after Anna. Susan and I spent an enjoyable hour talking about what’s been going on behind the scenes at Y! Personals for the past two years and what’s in store for the future.

When Susan arrived, the Y! Personals platform had not been touched since 2004. The communication tools were lacking and the overall service felt “kind of empty”, more like classifieds than personals.

Search data storage and system architecture exhibited a lack of flexibility and scalability that had to be addressed before the service could grow.

Susan’s goal was to grow and improve the business and product as well as finding new audiences.

First up, a new platform. Planning for the development of the new Y! Personals platform began in late 2005.The goal was an infrastructure which would support a more expressive, richer interactive user experience. Plus, the system needed to be flexible and module enough to enable building for the future.

This next section is for those of you more interested in the technical details behind the new platform.

Y! Personals is built on top of a completely new system architecture featuring state of the art performance enhancements.

The search database was rebuilt. Search is now XML driven, featuring much more flexible data maps. Was using MySql, now on Oracle. Susan’s team spent six months testing seven different database platforms. The improved search system made enabling new search features much faster and easier than the legacy system. The new database systems features *much* faster database calls between databases anda consolidated XML formatting of data.

I was not aware that Y! Personals has had an API all of 2006, but it’s only accessible to affiliates.

The Front End

Susan says the majority of the front end is new, utilizing JSON. One result that users appreciate and advertisers won’t is that revamped Web 2.0 features reduced the number of clicks it takes to do common actions, resulting in fewer pageviews for ads.

New Features

Side-by-side profile comparisons were launched December 2006.

Photos updates: July 2007, featuring 10 photos instead of five. This has greatly increased the number of photos posted. Eight different flavors of photo file formats can be uploaded, up from only one.

The addition of searchable captions has been appreciated by yours truely. Providing a context and description of photos is an efficient way to increase the amount of information that can be gleaned from a profile.

Upcoming Features

New communications tools and interaction capabilities are coming Q4 2007. Expect additional search capabilities and new features through 2008.

I asked Susan about Yahoo! Hack Day, where developers spent a day working on things they would like to see rolled out. (Funny video done for Hack Day, featuring naked puppets, almost NSFW.) Her response was intriguing, saying she supports and endorses the culture of Hack Day and that Yahoo! is committed to hacking and innovation. I can’t help but wonder what features will roll out based on Hack Day.

Given that Yahoo! has such an incredible amount of content, people and services, Susan at the team spend a lot of time thinking a lot about synergies.

Yahoo owns Delicious, Flickr, Yahoo 360, Mash (inf0) and countless other social applications.

The best quote of the interview was Susan saying “How can people have control of their info, how viewed and discovered?” We discussed a few other emerging features that while seemingly no-brainers, Susan swore me to secrecy, so you’ll just have to wait.

Forbes has this to say in article The Algorithm Of Love :

Look for people to match themselves against song lists from Yahoo! Music, perhaps, or photographs from the Yahoo!-owned Flickr photo site. Flickr’s tagging technology, where people mark attractive photos and pool the information, may also be applied to dating.

My take on this at Yahoo Working Towards Richer Profiles. But at what cost to legacy applications like 360? Yahoo did a bold move when they closed Photos and migrated everyone to Flickr. I’m wondering what the effect of new social apps like Mash will be on Yahoo360, most likely cannibalization.

Most embarassing moment of the conversation:

Me: How tightly do you plan on integrating Yahoo Messenger?
Susan: It’s been integrated for over a year.

Susan is also tasked with finding new members for Y! Personals. One would think that with several hundred million members, this would be less of a problem, but when you see the saturation of eHarmony and Match in radio and print, it makes you wonder why Yahoo hasn’t entered the mainstream media market with the same aggressiveness.

Partnership deals

Y! Personals has many different partners, one of the most recent being Beliefnet’s Soulmatch , which I wrote about last year. Yahoo also distributes Beliefnet content through their CMS (content management system).

Note: Here I have taken the liberty of pastebombing various notes from my last conversation with Anna Zornosa.

Whats happening in EU, the deal with Match? What comes around goes around.
Yahoo had a deal with Match in 2000, now they have a partnership in the UK with Match again. Co-branded dating channels in the UK and Germany with global dating giant Match.com.

Other partnerships: Rent.com, Glam.co, Reunion.com.
Yahoo gender balance: m/f even.
Subscriptions: There are some 5.5 million unique monthly visitors on Yahoo! Personals worldwide. 4.5 M US, 1M UK
There will be much more emphasis on partnership deals this year. The strategic principle is to look at each country on specific basis.
Strong partner tools in place.
Factors taken into consideration: what does Yahoo have in place, what does the country have to offer?
France was outsourced.
Relaunched Japan’s Personals last year.

Update: Yahoo Personals has settled with one Robert Anthony over a date-baiting case from last fall.

Thanks to Susan for taking the time to talk to me. It’s not every day that I get to peek behind the curtain of a major dating site.

Subscribe to Susan’s blog to keep up with what’s happening at Yahoo! Personals.

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Yahoo! Personals Research will release tomorrow the results of a study about National Break-Up Season, the period between the holidays and Valentine’s Day. A companion section of Y! Personals will contain information to help singles break up more effectively. More in the morning.

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I was checking something out on About.com and saw this ad for Yahoo Personals. Y! is entering into various partnerships with high-traffic sites, I keep coming across them randomly from time to time.

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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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As I previously mentioned, Yahoo Personals has rolled out a few enhancements to the service. Have you seen the overview of the new customizable profile? Very nice. I like the idea of being able to customize the quick view, displaying the traits you feel most important right at the top of the page. Some of the changes are very similar to Match.com in terms of layout and features. I’m liking what I see happening at Y! Personals. We’ll see how it affects signups.
Yahoo! Personals has a blog as well as gift certificates at $24.95 for a month.

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Tomorrow, Wednesday December 20th, Yahoo Personals is launching a variety of enhancements to member profiles. New Sr. PR Manager Jason Khoury send me details on the upgrades, as well as an overview of the last six months of new features.

Among the enhancements to the Web site is a new capability called Quick View, which offers a new way for daters to efficiently browse profiles.

• Yahoo! Personals daters no longer have to scroll up and down to compare a profile owner’s information with what he or she desires in a match.
• Members can select from 15 different traits and characteristics to create their own personalized checklist of deal breakers – or in this case, date makers or breakers.
• No one else in the industry gives users the capability to personalize and customize their view of matching traits.

Quick View is a part of a visual refresh of the most viewed page on Yahoo! Personals – Profile Details. The redesign includes:

• Personalized view of profile data: The searcher can list the attributes that are most important to him/her at the top of the profile page for an easy, first glance at a profile.
• Side by side presentation of a person’s profile and his/her ideal match: No more scrolling up and down to compare. When viewing a profile, users can easily scan the profile owner’s information as well as what he or she desires in a match. A way to quickly identify if both people will find each other interesting.
• Clustered profile data: Profile data is divided into relevant categories – an easier and more intuitive way to scan for important information.
• Improved visual appeal: Visual refresh creates a more pleasant online dating experience.

The launch of Quick View is just one of many feature upgrades launched by Yahoo! Personals in the last six months:

• Virtual matchmaker – Mailbox Matching: The mailbox automatically sorts incoming communications by how well the sender matches the recipient’s preferences. It compares the information included in the sender’s profile with the things the receiver marks as “must havesâ€? for their potential match, like religion, ethnicity, etc. Ones that are a fit are placed in “Matchesâ€? folder, and messages from someone that isn’t an exact fit are sent to the “Maybe’sâ€? folder.
• Online bouncer – Email Masking: To protect its customers, the mailbox now masks email addresses included in communications to non-subscribers. This feature protects users’ anonymity.
• Who’s Viewed Me: Yahoo! Personals provides the online dating community with the broadest and most empowering feature for making a connection. Offered to both posters and subscribers, “Who’s Viewed Meâ€? fosters additional communication and user activity by allowing customers to see who has viewed their profile.

While I’m glad to see Yahoo adding features, much lot of what Yahoo Personals is rolling out are things that should have been taken care of two years ago. The email masking was particularly problematic, glad that’s fixed. Interesting they didn’t mention the new page about safety.
Yahoo is showing their commitment to improve the service, which should help drive signups and make the service easier to use.

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