Userplane is rolling out new features over the next few months. The following was part of an email sent to clients.
Userplane Presence
Although some Userplane clients have implemented infrastructure necessary to handle the burden of messaging and presence – many of our clients prefer to have this complex overhead offloaded entirely to Userplane. We will be releasing (as an optional service) an API for comprehensive web-presence that will eliminate strain on your servers and dramatically improve Userplane application performance.Desktop Presence (including message & alert broadcasting)
This new lightweight, downloadable desktop application will allow your users to remain “present” on your site regardless of actually being on your site – around the clock. Not only will this enhance your online numbers and foster more constant member communication, you will be able to deliver off-site messages and alerts anytime. The application will have a persistent background connection with your web-presence system and/or Userplane’s XML and presence infrastructure. The application itself will be very customizable – sitting unobtrusively in the PC system tray – allowing you to deliver content directly to the desktop, list all desktop-presence users online, and launch IM windows without having users log into your actual website.Anonymous Calling
Userplane will be releasing an anonymous calling function to plug into the existing application suite. This will be a premium paid calling service built directly into the interface and will be set up to generate a payment transaction back to your site.In addition to these core upcoming features, stay tuned for updates around additional skinning options, Webmessenger content archiving, SMS integration, and many other new features we believe will greatly enhance your community!
I’m liking this new trend of enhanced presence, which Userplane and Vivox are both focusing on.
Stickier dating sites could mean more advertising dollars and subscription revenue, although definitive metrics of the benefits are difficult to come by.
My initial reaction is that for dating sites,
I am not a fan of yet another app running in the system tray. Both companies would do well to integrate with existing messenger applications and drop the custom clients. But existing IM clients don’t have the functionality of these next-generation messaging application.
A conundrum. Who needs another IM window to deal with? I have Skype, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, ICQ, Jabber gateway, soon Myspace (probably never on Mac though).
I spend about two hours a day in Skype and an hour on IM. My presence is built into them, and global forwarding to my mobile phone is right around the corner. I’ll pay $9.95 a month to forward all my communications to whatever device I’m on, sometimes several during the course of a normal day. Adapt to how I use the devices, not the other way around.
I go to dating sites to go look at dating sites. The whole always-on aspect makes me suspicious. I want to go in, check messages, send a few, and then get outta there. I want to spend the least amount of time on the site or in the chat as possible. I don’t want that stuff popping up at work, although I like the idea of it being routed to my phone when I’m bored. Makes me feel wanted, powerful feature.
Most people come home and check their email for a bit, is this where extended presence will become beneficial? Why would you want to have users communicate when they are not logged into your website? Unless there is a way to log their actions, wouldn’t that reduce visitor ranking? Why not just send my daily matches to my IM client or RSS feed and do away with the website entirely?
Devil’s advocate I may be, but the value proposition for dating sites is still unclear because the revenue stream is dependent on a promise, not cash in the bank except for anonymous calling.
Anonymous calling will be useful to some, maybe Mike Jones at Userplane or Rob Seaver at Vivox will chime in to provide additional information about the average costs of the service and the other benefits of their offerings.
The question is why pay for it when you can get it for free, or close to it, on Skype or soon Yahoo and AIM? Because most net denizens are not savvy enough, especially in the dating space, and perhaps prefer tight integration with the site they belong too and don’t want to be bothered with all the other stuff. Nobody knows much more than this at this point, will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.
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