I was just sitting here thinking (again) about what it would take to pull the profiles from Match and Yahoo! and display them on an aggregator website. Why bother with all the revenue share, partnership agreements and other troublesome administrivia that Lycos has to deal with when a few days with a decent programmer would net you a working meta-search dating site?
Looking at the job listings for the dating industry, I see this:
Yahoo! Personals, the leading online dating service, seeks a product leader who is an innovative strategic thinker with extensive hands-on product management experience. You will identify, evaluate and drive opportunities to increase distribution of our service via RSS-feeds, API’s for data transfer to publishers, co-brand partnerships, and white-label solution
Yahoo! is looking to make it easier for partners to pull profiles from their centralized database of profiles. Very SpringStreet/Relationship Exchange. Attempting to white-label their service could be a big revenue generator, when all a partner has to do is search for short/fat/kinky/conservative, pull the RSS feed and populate their niche site, presto, instant dating site. I bet the media companies are going to love this. How many newspaper sites are going to jump on this opportunity?
As for the candidate, they must “Develop accurate understanding of online dating landscape and identify areas for competitive differentiation.” Just read the blog.
