WIRED News has article about a new meta-dating service called Collaboradate. A few clarifications should to be made, as WIRED got some of the story incorrect. Collaborate is nothing like Trillian, which aggregates all your instant messenger accounts into a single window. Collaborate is basically a mashup of multiple dating sites. You can view free profiles but only contact people if you belong to the service. I wrote about dating site mashups last fall, and have written a few Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that merged Match.com and Yahoo Personals results together.
A few months ago I said:
After a while, I started thinking about a browser based on Mozilla that was tuned up with extensions and helper apps which facilitated managing multiple dating site accounts and especially profiles. A first step towards integrated profiles and cross-site subscriptions. Why wait for dating sites to federate when we can do the same thing in the browser?
This is somewhat near to the Collaboradate concept. I love the idea of a meta-dating service, but having to maintain yet another account at yet another site doesn’t do it for me. This is one guy out of about a dozen people who are trying to create metadating sites. None of them have deals with the dating sites, they are just pulling profiles which is the easy part. A well-integrated and seamless browsing experience without random pay-walls is the only way this sort of thing is going to take off.
Collaboradate might be able to pull it off, but it’s going to need more than DateMapping gimmicks and other beta features to make a big enough splash to matter. I hope they keep going with it, it’s the nicest mashup I’ve seen so far.
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