Cleaning out the draft blog folder today, a bunch of posts from all over the place I hope you will find interesting and inspiring.
Matt Humphrey of Bumba Labs on User Retention Curves (Andrew Chen)
It’s easy to think of retention percentages in the 90’s as good. It just feels good. But over the course of time, products in the low-to-mid 90’s will fade super-fast, and ones only slightly more sticky will do much, much better. Single percentage points here are mission critical, that’s why attention to detail and rigorous analytics become so important on the web.
Online dating sites are going to have to dig deeper into analytics and Customer Relationship Management. I was glad to hear this mentioned all too briefly at the final iDate LA panel.
Sense Networks gets $6M in hotly contested deal for “tribe†advertising.
Sense doesn’t require a direct relationship with the consumer. Instead, it might partner with companies like mobile social networking company, Loopt, for example. After I’ve opted in to use Loopt’s service, that service gets updates from my GPS-enabled phone about where I am at any given time. Loopt then provides that data to Sense, which anonymizes the data (Sense isn’t interested in identifying your name or other specific information about you), and can help Loopt run more relevant advertising.
This could be a great idea for dating sites as well. I brought this up the concept in one of the mobile sessions at iDate. Everyone freaks out about anonymity though, which is simply a challenge to overcome and should not keep the dating industry from embracing location-based services of all types, not just mobile.
I see a lot of pr0n sites (early adopters as always) using technology similar to Live Face. Talking heads on dating sites might work, it’s all in the copywriting.
SpyFu shows what the competition is paying for keywords like online dating.
SeleniumHQ Web application testing system.
Will dating sites suffer from Data Center Overload?(NY Times).
Utherverse, an adult 3D social/dating network.
Michael Norton worked on the paper People Are Experience Goods: Improving Online Dating with Virtual Dates with professor Dan Ariely. Ravit at Omnidate references this paper often.
Eric Klaassen at Dating Facts wrote about a recent research study, Online dater search too long, and too little dating. (translated).
