Infrequent posting lately. Was in New York City for a lost weekend, finishing up projects, spending some mental health time out of the office and checking out traffic stats as part of a preemptive move to posting twice a week.
Looks like I’m going to be part of a dating-related radio show, which is doing a soft launch next week, stay tuned for more details.
Michael Arington Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day, but did it involve puppets? (total inside j/k.) I’m excited to try out the yet-to-be-release application for the iPhone. Reminds me of Dodgeball, but in a good way. Dodgeball sold to Google in 2005 and as can be the case, Google let it languish until the founders bailed.
My iPhone has changed the way I access email, chat, Twtter and everything else. I still would rather browse full profiles on my 24″ monitor and I’m not paying Match another $5 a month for email access over my phone. Maybe three years ago, but with unlimited data plans being the norm now, that pricing model is outdated. Lose the fee and I bet people will use the feature a lot more. Unless they are making a killing at that price point and I don’t know what I’m talking about (happy Markus?)
Speed Dating 2.0 now available on Facebook. Press release.
Why this will never work on Facebook in it’s current format (really, I’m in a good mood today):
I had to fill out a form, create a username and a password. My first and last name are required (huh?) It thought I was female and older by default.
Then they ask me to upload a photo. I already have photos on Facebook, why not just ask to import them?
That information is already in Facebook, how could they get this so wrong right out of the gate?
I jumped into a room. 10 seconds to go. Here we go. Wait, no camera check, camera is not on. Room closed, nobody else in it. Sigh.
Creating a room is nowhere near as intuitive as Woome and all rooms open in 10 minutes be default. There is no way to remove the room I created. I don’t have time for this.
The video speed dating market is already sorting itself out. It’s a battle between Speeddate.com and Woome as far as I’m concerned. Nobody else is even close.
Unfortunately, it’s time for mainstream media to do it’s thing, promote the hell out of it, then the jerks will show up, ruin it for everyone, and in a year the stigma will be worse than it is today.
Nefarious online dating scam idea for the week. Build up a dating site with fake profiles and stolen identities, then flip it. According to BoingBoing, prices for stolen identities are at an all-time low.
…Access to bank accounts was now going for as little as $10 in the second half of 2007, and that thieves were increasingly selling stolen credit card numbers in batches of 500 for a total of $200, or 40 cents each.
Buying a person’s whole identity, which includes a credit card number, Social Security number or ID and a person’s name, address and date of birth, would only now set you back $100 for 50, so $2 per stolen identity.
Heard from Andrew, founder of DearCupid.org, which has 500,000 visitors every month. According to Andrew, it’s the best place for relationship Q+A’s.
The White Label Dating database platform has been upgraded and several big partner announcements. Check out the blog.
On April 4th I saw a post at the WLD blog that announced the launch of a UK version of PlentyOfFish but now it’s gone. Link goes to the Google cache of the page. I won’t link to the actual site url, it contains nudity on the home page.
Two things upset me this week.
First, I saw a True.com ad on OkCupid. As a new father, Sam is obviously so tired that it’s affecting his judgement. Please tell me you are making a boatload of cash off of those links.
Second, remember the YourTownSingles.org signage I posted about last week? An eagle-eyed reader wrote in to say they saw them all over Ohio.
We signed up, went through their process and guess who called us back? Great Expectations, the brick and mortar dating service. I thought it was actually quite interesting. I even went through their interview process because I was curious of their pricing. (Expensive!) Although cheesy, I have to think it brings them in business because they are constantly being thrown up in new cities all around NE Ohio.
Illegal advertising, not good!
Deep thought for the day: The users of your website are not really your customers. Instead, the entire process of gathering eyeballs is just to sell to your ACTUAL customers, who are the ad agencies and advertisers. Get it? Your Web 2.0 consumer startup is actually a B2B that sells inventory to brand advertisers. Via Andrew Chen.
