Happy Cinco de Mayo. Do yourself a favor and take it easy with the tequila tonight. Recently someone mentioned Stir, which for a time replaced DownTo Earth, Match.com’s answer to PlentyofFish. Stir is it’s own site now, going head to head with Going.com, which was sold to AOL. I wrote about Going back in 2006 when it was called Heyletsgo. All of this by way of running across Wertago, an iPhone application that “provides up-to-the-second information about hot venues, share content and influence the social scene, coordinate plans with all your friends, and connect with socialites all across the city.” Definitely a 20-something urban party scene app, perfect for planning tonight’s festivities. Lots of these popping up on the radar lately. One of my new favorite iPhone apps is Happy Hours, which lists bars around the city and their drink/food specials.
Gay dating site/social network Fabulis went from 5,000 to 20,000 members in 30 days. In the last 24 hours they have had users answer 20,000 questions on the site. I actually don’t like that I can only sign up with Facebook. A new member hasn’t even tried the site, knows little about it, and all of a sudden it wants to connect and start publishing to their Facebook wall. This seems like unnecessary friction. Signup issues aside, their use of social media to promote the launch of the site is fantastic. Dating sites would do well to pay attention to the Fabulis marketing team. Fabulis is creating an iPhone application as well, the screenshot reminds me of a cleaned up Grindr.
Ning is a provider of social networks and free dating sites that many companies have launched test sites on. Ning is launching three new versions of the Ning Service July and the free version is going away.
Offerpal Media launches a virtual money war with Facebook: like viximo for universal online gaming currency. Offerpal was founded in 2007 and it has issued more than 1 trillion virtual points to over 225 million consumers across 2,000 publishers. At one time or another several Facebook dating applications have used the service.
Geek alert: A Solution for Gigantic Dating Sites: This one is for the eHarmony’s, Match’s and PlentyofFishe’s of the online dating industry. Read Clustrix Builds the Webscale Holy Grail: A Database That Scales. Clustrix plans to sell its appliance (which consists of more than a terabyte of memory and its proprietary software) to web firms that don’t want to take on the complicated task of sharding their data (replicating it across multiple databases), or moving to less robust database options like Cassandra or a key value store such as what’s provided by Twitter. A bargain at $80,000 for a 3-node machine containing the software.
More and more dating blogs are talking about how to get the best dating site deals. Some list free communication weekends and timely deals. Others are focusing on telling people to sign up for a site and immediately un-subscribe. Usually you receive a greatly-discounted subscription offer shortly thereafter. I wonder what percentage of new dating site members are doing this?
Chatroulette Update Coming Soon: All Things Digital intern Drake Martinet spent a long cold night in front of the Palo Alto, Calif., Apple store with Chatroulette creator Andrey Ternovskiy.
First, he showed me something likely to be termed Chessroulette, in which a chessboard or other simple game shows up on the screen and users tap out messages. The idea is that they can play instead of type.
“People meet each other and don’t have anything to talk about,” Ternovskiy said. “This is kind of like an ice breaker.”
He also showed me a nearly completed version in which, instead of seeing a small image of yourself and another small image of your Chatroulette pal, “you open the window and you just have one big picture of your partner.”
Moving to a gaming model is smart. Makes the site much more sticky and gives people more time to buy stuff and click on ads. The site now features a prominent Dating button, which leads to True.com. Expect Chatroulette to be acquired in 2010.
