Every once in a while I freshen up my various profiles. New headlines, new photos, new interests, reflecting the ever-changing me.
My checklist of sites to revisit goes something like this:
Various dating sites
Myspace, Friendster
Tribe.net, Yahoo 360
LinkedIn,Guru.com
Plazes
And so on.
This week I tagged a photo of myself on Flickr as “single” and pasted my dating profile alongside, so now I have to add that to my watch-list. This got me thinking about all of the clever ways people are starting to utilize Web 2.0 services in ways the creators haven’t initially expected.
One of the most interesting things about Web2.0 is the notion of remixing web services.
Flickr has tags, search, photostreams and various exploration tools that are used by many Web 2.0 services, from apartment hunting to criminal tracking. Copying my Match profile to my Flickr account was simple.
Let’s get more creative. You could take your profile from JDate and copy it into your Plazes account. The idea behind Plazes is to claim ownership of a particular place. It could be your home, a local Kinko’s or a Starbucks during a business trip. You can add whatever you want to certain fields of your profile on Plazes, so you paste in your dating profile. Easy enough.
But wait, Plazes can display photos from your Flickr account, and geocode them too. And Plazes displays your location by pulling in GoogleMaps. Now we have a handful of well-defined web services, each providing a layer of functionality that together makes the sum larger than it’s parts.
It wouldn’t take much to layer on say speedDating events from Eventful on top of your Plazes/Flickr/GoogleMaps mashup, because these services make it simple to aggregate, filter and remix their content. A site like Consumating could do the whole thing in a couple of days, because their foundation is based on open standards, leading-edge web services, tags, and simple extensibility hooks. Instantly they would have features leagues apart from other more established dating sites. The possibilities are mind-blowing when you look at the growing menu of web services at your disposal and an experienced web developer nearby.
Hybrid dating sites can be developed faster, cheaper, scale better and grow more organically than traditional Web 1.0 dating sites. However, reducing Customer Acquisition costs and flawlessly executing a rock-solid marketing plan are as, if not more important than bells and whistles in the long run.
[tags: consumating, flickr, plazes]
