Online dating is really a misnomer. As I’ve often said, people don’t date at a dating site. Dating sites are really online introduction services. They peruse profiles and the dating site acts as an intermediary, passing along anonymous emails and IM’s. Look at a photo, feel the butterflies, send an email, move the conversation over to Hotmail or Yahoo email and then possibly meet up. Rinse, repeat.
After a few months the online dating experience is getting tired. That’s why the average subscription length is 3 months. The initial thrill in on the wane. Besides the emotional exhaustion, there is nothing to do at most dating site besides stare at profiles.
No wonder less than one half of all singles uses online dating sites in the US.
While visiting a dating site is strictly a utilitarian exercise, at a social networking site I can click a friend, click their friends, and an hour later I’m 76 degrees away from where I started, listening to a new rock band and perusing more scantily clad co-eds than a frat house party. Talk about pageviews! These services can group people together based on interests, location, age, sexual preference, music and so on. Or, the members can self-identify and seek out others via pronouncements on their profiles or using tags.
What if you had more options for interacting with people on a dating site? What if dating became more like social networking?
Last week I met with Vivox, a company with the vision to take online dating to the next level. Vivox develops tools and services to help daters communicate easier, safer, and on on their own terms. Vivox sees an opportunity to increase the volume and value of interactivity on dating sites. Stickier sites tend to retain members more, and for free sites, ad dollars increase. Instead of ceding control of the dating experience to the dating site operator, Vivox is positioned to put the power back into the hands of daters.
There are a whole slew of companies who have tried to enter the online dating space with anonymous phone numbers, background checks, click-to-call, double-blind email addresses and other safety and communication features. Most of these companies saw the spike in online dating revenue, rewrote their marketing plane to include the dating vertical, and sponsored a few parties at trade shows, only to fade off into the distance when they realized how stubborn and reluctant dating sites are to change, especially when it comes to technology.
What’s interesting is that Vivox can do all of these things. The company is not a one-trick pony, which is partly why other companies have has such a difficult time partnering with dating sites. Why partner with 5 sites when you can get the same features and functionality from one, and them some?
Vivox in a nutshell is all about contextual communication and presence awareness. For the demo I saw, users download a chat client, which is used to communicate with others on the pal lists, regardless if they are logged into the originating dating site or not. The chat client has several features not found in most IM clients which aren’t public at this time. The features I saw were centered around controlling and managing the pace and tempo of dating online.
As we move from POTS (plain old telephone service) to VOIP (voice over internet protocol), companies like Vivox are busy figuring out how to integrate our everyday communication with our online lives. Regular IM is not very flexible. Either we’re talking or we’re not. You see me as online or I’m not. Most IM clients can’t route messages, they just save them for later. Vivox has the technical chops and back-end services to do all kinds of interesting things with your online communication, whether it be voice, IM or group chat. They also have 500,000 existing users.
During an average day, I’m IM’ing from my desktop or phone, or chatting from either. I’m taking inbound calls from some people, not others. I’m doing conference calls and interviews over Skype, I’m checking messages, leaving messages, reading chat transcripts and more. Then I go to check my dating sites, and I stare at static profiles.
Userplane has done a good job getting their chat client on several major dating and social networking sites. They have proven that singles like to chat online, in the context of the dating experience.
To understand the full impact of what Vivox can offer, you have to think of the chat client being the conduit to a full range of other services. Anyone who has actually logged more than 10 minutes in a dating chat knows that the same blather that goes on in Yahoo chat rooms goes on in dating site chat rooms.
Whereas Userplane doesn’t control communication between two or more parties, Vivox provides a level of control that may make it much easier and comfortable for people to jump into chat rooms, identify like-minded people and create ad hoc communities of interest.
I was keenly aware that i was only grokking part of the whole picture during the demo. Each time I asked “but can it do so-and-so” I would get a knowing look and I would start to rant about a feature, only to hear “that’s coming soon.” Vivox clearly understands how people communicate, and their ideas about how we will communicate in the future remain intriguing.
Vivox will offer tiered communication levels (free vs. paid) and say they are keen to adapt to the needs of the dating industry (read, flexible to varied integration requirements).
Vivox has the vision to change the face of online dating. Vision is the easy part, the devil is in the details. Putting together deals with dating sites may prove to be more of an uphill battle than they expected. They can always choose to offer the services directly to consumers, but integration with at least a few major dating sites will be central to their success in the dating space.
[tags: instant+messaging, videoconferencing, vivox, voip]
