Ben Brown is the co-creator of Consumating. Ben lives in Austin, TX, works as a technology consultant by day, and rolls out new features on Consumating at night. Ben’s co-creator is adam, now a product manager for [company nameremoved]. Consumating started, as many great projects do, as a side project two years ago. With renewed interest, partly due to their reaction to current dating sites and a new generation of internet technologies, the site is taking off, adding almost a thousand new users a day.
From Laughing Squid:
Ben Brown (editor of the newist “ist” Austinist and accidental host of the final after party of SXSW Interactive) and Adam Mathes (aka the Google Bomber) have just launched Consumating. Consumating is an online social network for dating that uses tags (similar to what is utilized by Technorati, Flickr, etc.) and weekly questions to help people connect online and, if all goes well, offline. It also uses quite a bit of AJAX and no, I’m not talking about the stuff you clean your sink with.
In Ben’s words, Consumating is for finding and meeting new people. What you do after you meet someone is up to you, but he hopes people are having fun. Put it this way, you won’t find the site touting how many marriages have occurred betwen members. More like how many hookups. Mainly populated by the San Francisco/Austin/Suicidegirls demographic, although that could change at any time. AP mentioned Consumating in a story about tagging, which means the masses are not far behind.
What makes the site so special? Several things. Consumating is an after-work project for a small handful of people. No VC, no CEO, no biz dev people to get in the way of rolling out the most technologically advanced and feature-rich relationship site to date.
The site rolls out new features at a pace that would make the engineering teams at the large date warehouses heads spin. The whole operation is nimble, not just built to scale, built to allow features to rolled out while dinner is cooking on the stove. If people don’t like a feature on the development server, poof it disappears. A note to current dating sites: You don’t have to ask members the same 20 questions for 5 years. Dynamic profiles are a key feature of dating sites moving forward. If you don’t have them, you’re doing your members a disservice.
The site is tagalicious. You can create tags to describe yourself. For example, some of my tags are 72inchestall, boston , bowling, browneyes, brownhair, enfp and so on.
Other people can tag me too. Their tags show up in the sidebar as yellow, mine are white. It’s fascinating to see people tag each other, the creativity is amazing. WorkedforFedEx, sleptwithmybrother, lovesmegan, the tag soup is meta-data that brings a whole new level of interactivity and stickieness to the process of finding new friends.
This is where it gets interesting, and problematic. A lecherous 45 year old pervert can tag a sweet young thing something nasty. Ben is putting more controls in place so that this sort of thing stays an exception to the rule, rather than the norm.
The process of searching for people is completely different from anything you have seen. At a typical dating site user logs in, does a search, checks out the results and sends a few emails, then does another search, sends a few emails, and so on. The discovery process is not very interesting, and gets tiring quickly. At Consumating, instead of searching for people by geographic location, age, height or weight, you simply click on the words representing the qualities you are looking for in someone.
Here are some tags:
books reading movies music glasses tall blogging blueeyes browneyes brownhair computers skinny brunette art internet writing cooking blonde geek hiking travel short drinking photography videogames dancing programming camping design california texas rock hair swimming eyes sex austin brown film greeneyes.
From the site:
The words to the left are tags. They’re words that people have used to describe themselves and the things they like to do. When you click one, we’ll show you all the people who have described themselves with that word. Then, we allow you to add words to your list, filtering people down until you find the person you’re looking for. The bigger the tag word, the more people have used it to describe themselves.
Consumating has taken queries from search to click.
Once you have put together a nice list of descriptive tags, you can subscribe to your list with your favorite RSS newsreader. No clunky weekly emails with the same 20 people that you get from most services. Once your Hotlist is in an RSS feed, you can do all sorts of stuff with it locally which I’ll get into some other time.
Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Search Engine Watch, said this about tagging:
The noise and deliberate manipulation will probably just bring the system into a crashing halt.
A good point, and one that developers must address before the value of tags are diluted into irrelevance. I predict that blog comment authentication scheme TypeKey, or something like it, will be used to protect tags from abuse.
Every week or so, a new question is posted to the site. Members can choose to answer questions such as this weeks ripped from the headlines “You’re about to have a huge wedding when you get cold feet. What’s your strategy for evading all obligations?” No psychological probing or personality testing here. Just questions that are fun to answer.
The Indie click Network runs the advertising on the site. They don’t usually sign on a starter site, but they know that Consumatings “Hot nerdy girls and indie rock boys” was their optimum market.
The ad on my profile page today is:
Totally FREE Porn
Everyone needs some porn.. check it out.
Advertise on consumating
Not exactly for the Match crowd, but then it’s not pretending to be. Consumating is much more fun to peruse than AdultFriendfinder. Whatever your kink, fetish or desire, there’s a tag there that links to people who share your particular thing. If there’s not a tag, create one, so others can find you.
When I mentioned to Ben that geeks are ferverent early adopters, and asked what his plan was for broadening the demographics, he replied that everyone is a geek in some way, depending on subject matter. Cosumating will cater to the geek in all of us.
Rating people is as easy as clicking an up or down thumb. You can rate people in their main profile, and also rate their question answers. It’s addictive and super-sticky, I hit the site several times a day, like the old HotOrNot. The best answer of the week wins credits, which at some point will be used to contact other users, much like the SpringStreet and Lavalife model.
Soon there will be a monitoring page, where you’ll be able to see who’s checking out your page, rating you, sharing your tags and much more. Similar to seeing who’s viewed your profile, or winked at you, but more dynamic because at Consumating, everything is tied in as web services.Your Flickr account, 43 things and Upcoming stuff and of course your del.icio.us tags.
Other external presence will be pulled into your Consumating profile. It’s easy because it’s all modules that Ben puts together while dinner is cooking. This is exciting stuff! Imagine a composite profile based on an aggregation of your various website affiliations. There is a 3rd party API that’s in the works. I can’t wait to see what sort of functionality and data they are going to expose to the outside world. It’s all XML and RSS, consumers and developers are going to have a field day at Consumating.
I logged into the development server to see what’s coming down the pipes and I saw some amazing stuff that had me going “why didn’t I think of that?” It’s the kind of site where you just have to keep coming back, to update your questions, tag people and see “who would do you.” It’s the most infectious site I’ve been to in a long time. Much more appealing than other dynamic sites such as MySpace in terms of the user experience. The site is clean, not overloaded with distractions, and it doesn’t look like a dating site, which is a nice change from the generic excuses for home pages on most dating sites. Just say no to stock photos of impossible beautiful people.
Dating applications, location-based services, it’s all coming down the pipe. There are so many features packed into this site, you have to go try it for yourself.
Ben would like this to be a full-time gig within a year. Newsflash, I don’t think it will be even close to that long before the right opportunity presents itself to take Consumating to the next level.
