I am spending more time at Fastcupid, because like it or not, the old Spring Street Network is the closest thing to a dating pool that worked for me. I’m a Mac guy and ENFP, a real five-percenter, and huge dating sites with middling demographics tend not to deliver.
After major pushback from members, the reactive transition to FriendFinder systems has just about played itself out. The fixes keep on coming and many of the major flaws have been addressed.
My main complaint is that the site looks and feels much cheaper than it use to. The fit and finish is similar to downgrading from a Porsche to a Saturn. Both get you to the market, but I’d rather be in the Porsche.
I did an interview with the WSJ yesterday where we primarily focused on the “see who bookmarked/hotlisted you” features on social networking and dating sites. At Fastcupid I emailed several of the women who bookmarked me in the last month. To some I said “hey what are you waiting for” and others I asked more questions about what they liked about my profile that drove them to add me to their hotlist and most importantly, why they hotlisted me but haven’t reached out to contact me yet. I will report back what I hear from them as well as when the article runs.
Exposing hotlists is a solid first step towards greater transparency on dating and social networking sites. A system that reveals too much by default tends to make people anxious. Knowing that I put you on my hotlist is one thing. Knowing how many times I viewed your profile, or how many other women I have on my hotlist, may be considered TMI, Too Much Information.
A feature I would like to see all dating sites implement is “people who hotlisted this person also hotlisted these other people”. Remember that dating profiles are simply fields in a database. You can mix, match and search based on anything, depending on how complex the algorithm is. Most are overly simplistic. Others, like Userplane’s new search engine, enable increasingly complex searches.
Personality profiling can be useful, but when I can change a single answer from “Somewhat Disagree” to “Somewhat Agree” and go from Introvert to Extrovert, there’s just not enough fidelity to the system to make it really usable. Who knows how many matches I’m missing in my searches due to a single poorly worded question?
[tags: fastcupid, hotlist]
