Here are the bullet points for my speech at BU this week.
Social Capital in the Networked Era
Dating sites- “Introduction services”
Current strategy
Increase value of customers, not to customers
Focus on getting more customers
Leave money on the table
Offline partnering with online
Crowded marketplace- thousands of sites
Difficult to differentiate
Cheaper ain’t better.People use price as a filter
“Yahoo! Personals Premiere”, eHarmony $50/month
Adding personality tests- less than 1% take them
WeAttract- personality tests linked to Yahoo! profile
Free services
High attrition rate during move to paid subs
Lack of accountability & transparency
How many dates? Value of dates?
Better rating for adhering to 3rd date rule?
Legal- True.com
Future trends & success factors
Market contraction- stale sites and profiles (DEFINE)
Deeper alliances- Relationship Exchange, federation.
What is the value of a profile?
Better marketing- don’t insult visitors
Targeted advertising (know their habits and preferences)
Niche sites
Cowboy date
Consumating.com
From web sites to web services
Exposing services for consumption
ProfileDoctor is website to customers
Webservice to partners & affiliates
Maturation of tools
– rss, lamp, ajax web services
– Tagalicioius folksonomies
RDF RSS ENFP FOAF AJAX blogs
Yahoo! Personals, RSS partner feeds
“Beta is the new Black”
Delicious- built by consumers. Where is the line between what I own and the site owns. Not just data vs. features & functionality
Nice social networking/dating site hybrid
Movable Type – CMS
RSS feed from partner
Subscribe to value-added services provider
Join ad networks
Sites to Watch
8 Minute Dating
Started the speed dating craze
Networking Match- trade show speed dating
Del.icio.us
Technorati
I use Technorati almost as much as I Google.
Tribe.net
Pincus – dynamic, open profiles – 18 months
I call them blogs.
PROBLEM: centralized blogs.
Consummating.com
Tags
“23 people would sleep with so and so”
Location-based
Dodgeball
plazes
Social networking
Sitting at a computer is not social
Lot to learn from social networking sites
Social networking sites searching for answers
Friendster on 3rd CEO?
$15M funding
Myspace eating their lunch
comScore says 7th largest internet property in Feb.
9 million unique visitors!
Site’s best feature originally a software bug
Ability to change Look & Feel.
Deja vu 1995 Sixdegrees.com, Geocities
LinkedIn
Degrees of separation- more than a few a waste of my time
Recommendation engines need to get smarter
Lack of effective Aggregation, Filters, Granularity
REPUTATION MANAGEMENT
Identify, Track, manage your online persona
Trufina
Id Verification, background checks
First line of defense: Ax murderer 50 pixels from husband material
Examples
• GreatBF/GF- testimonials
• Rateadate- negative feedback
• Slashdot article rating system- threshold
• eBay- primitive reputation management
Early Days
Match, Friendfinder
Pay to get highlighted
Frequency of login is only way to get to top of search results
Blogs
Going from LinkRank(Link early, link often) , trackbacks and comments
to Earn the right to connect to me, publish me in your blogroll.
Contexta
External business Environment
www.https://onlinedatingpost.com/files/prefuse
Visualization of Google zeitgeist
Press releases, stock prices, alliances & partnerships, hires/fires.
Open access is important component of reputation management systems
Contextually- aware open profiles- FOAF
Closing Remarks
