After several years of losing ground to competitors and upstarts like Match.com and eHarmony, Yahoo! Personals is updating it’s creaky dating application and bringing it up to par with other paid dating services.
The new dating platform should make it easier to roll out new services. Although little is known about the “blazing efficient datamap”, new Oracle search engine or front end browser technology.
The goal is to manage costs, growth and give the site a functional facelift. An Oracle database and new servers set to scale to 100k new members a week don’t mean squat to the next wave of singles.
The first new set of features center around photos.
– Expanded photo display of up to ten photos (was 5).
– Ability to enter captions describing photos.
– Unique ability to search on photo captions.
– Multiple photo file format upload capabilities.
Adding a few more photos and the ability to let people know via captions that the arm around you in your profile pic is your brother and the baby is not your kid is not earth-shattering. Then again, it feels like Y! Personals has been in suspended animation for a few years now; any change should be considered positive at this point.
Word on the street is that Yahoo Personals GM Anna Zornosa has done a good job rebuilding the team after the short tenure of previous GM Lorna Borenstein, who was clearly not cut out for the job.
The last changes I can remember at Y! Personals was the date comparison upgrade back in December 2006.
Now that Yahoo is closing down Yahoo Photos and moving everyone over to Flickr, will they allow people to use Flickr photos in their profiles?
Susan Mernit , Senior Director, Product at !Y Personals, has more to say about the platform upgrade, there’s even a video demonstration.
With CEO Terry Semmel out and Founder Jerry Yang back at the helm, I wonder what else the Yahoo! empire has in store for us.
