Over the years, dating sites like Match.com have toyed with audio and video on profiles. Impediments included the need for special infrastructure, i.e special phone numbers to call into, or developing applications to record low quality video from sub megapixel webcams. And who do you know that had a webcam in 2003?
With ever-falling bandwidth prices, I see dating sites swinging the pendulum back to multimedia profile and messaging to increase member-to-member communication, fight scammers and increase the stickiness of their sites.
Several factors support this supposition. Fortunately, adding multimedia to profiles gets easier every year. Flash-based recording and display applets are easily embedded into profiles, which negates the need for special phone numbers, recording and playback systems. Recent Apple laptops come with built-in cameras and webcams from Logitech (slowly but) steadily increasing in megapixels.
Companies like Userplane (ed: advertiser on this blog) and Jangl are leading the pack of member communications tools, and it wouldn’t take much effort for them to offer audio/video modules easily embeddable in dating site profiles.
An anonymous calling company recently contacted me to see what I thought about their new service. Evidently there are a lot of people who have figured out how easy it is to start these services, and while there are various flavors of back-end technology powering them, the user experience is about the same for all of them.
At first I blew the company off. I get these emails all the time, and reviewing anonymous calling services is about as exciting as waiting for your profile photos to be approved on Match. Unless it’s Jangl, which is major coolio in terms of the system and how it works.
After receiving another email from what I take must be their PR department, I finally got around to checking out Jaxtr, a free anonymous calling service that takes a grammar hint from Jangl, and as an added twist, allows messages to be played back in web browsers. It’s G*Number a la 2003 all over again.
I’ve written about anonymous calling overload, ’nuff said.The reason I’m mentioning Jaxtr is that it could turn out to be an unauthorized parasitic service that ends up the Photobucket of the dating world.
If you haven’t heard about Photobucket, videos from the site were recently blocked by Myspace, who suddenly felt the need to flex it’s muscle when it found out Photobucket was up for sale, according to TechCrunch.
Most dating sites try to strip out anything remotely resembling a url. Perhaps Jaxtr can figure out a way to circumvent this limitation, without partnering with dating sites I don’t know how this would work.
It seems like Jangl or Userplane are much better suited to offering these services. They are technologically proven, have partnerships with large dating sites and understand the needs of the industry and it’s members. Maybe Jaxtr can partner with niche or adult sites.
Online dating is an inherently voyeuristic endeavor which benefits greatly from the additional dimensions of audio and video, whether it be in member-to-member communication or profiles.
We’re all tired of staring at bad photos and reading boring profiles. Time for dating sites to take a page from the social networking playbook and allowing members to embed videos and audio from Youtube or other (un)sanctioned sources.
