We’re getting past the time when people belong to a single dating/socialnetworking/affinity site. I am not only a single guy, and that’s not how I’m introduced to new company, so why should I only have a profile on a date-warehouse, when I want to be on an exercise dating site, a site for snowboarders, a Mac community then then don’t forget I want to hook up with my old friends on Facebook. What makes me me is my connection with each of these communities.
Tags are a big step in the right direction, but I want more. This brings us back to open user-controlled profiles, which I hope someone talks about at iDate.
I have something like 47 profiles at the moment. I’ve already un-subbed from about 25 dating sites, the rest are banking, social networking, publishing network preferences and so on.
Recently I attempted editing a few fields on each profile and it took over two hours because I had changed email addresses over time, forgotten passwords and otherwise had to battle with sites to unlock my profile to make changes. A real pain to say the least.
My days of daily participation in 15 or so dating sites are nearing the end. I’ve done the big-box sites, I’ve done the niche sites, I’ve done golfing sites (and I don’t even golf) and many others for a long time now.
Just let me subscribe to my matches with my RSS news reader because your design isn’t what I want, your features don’t address my specific needs and from now on you’re going to have to try a lot harder to win my business because you don’t seem to understand how to design a service for real people with real lives, expectations and time constraints. Tone down ego, get off of pedestal,
get out in the streets, talk to people, take 1/4 of your marketing budget and move it over to R&D, and go out and make a few mistakes, I promise it won’t hurt much and you’ll learn a lot more than you can imagine.
Oh, and before I forget, kudos to Match for doing a decent job copying over your Match photos and info to Chemistry.com.
[tags: open+profiles]
