Tonight was a beautiful night in Boston so I went to a restaurant overlooking the city on the waterfront here in Charlestown and hung out with new neighborhood friends. I came home and didn’t remember that Speeddate.com was having it’s inaugural event until 45 minutes into it.
Speeddate.com launched at Techcrunch40 a few weeks ago. Lot’s of buzz in the blogosphere. Bay area company attempting a feature that several dating sites, including Match, have tried and discarded a few years ago.
I went to Speeddate, configured the Flash setup for the site and was immediately greeted by a woman from the San Francisco Bay area. Talk about abrupt.
There is something to be said about a service where the first time you use it you are introduced to a good looking woman. I could get used to this. However, reality quickly set in as I learned that she, and all of the other women I talked to, worked for, or were related to Speeddate.com in some form or another.
As I struggled to settle into a round of banter, I soon realized that the audio and video lag was terrible, she was getting my audio a good 10 seconds after I spoke. Verbal ping-pong ensued, which was slightly disconcerting.
With 25 seconds left in our “date”, I finally saw the countdown timer. Oh, the pressure! I spent the rest of the conversation tweaking the Flash setting in my browser, and then she was gone.
I rated my first date as a match, but after looking at the results, she didn’t share my enthusiasm. Onward we go.
Bam! Another Bay area cutie is looking me straight in the eye. This instant-on stuff is too jarring, give me a moment to regain my composure. Perhaps a fade-in fade-out is in order. First dates just got a lot easier.
Many moons ago I dated a woman who ran a HurryDate event in Boston. On our third date she invited me to an event she was running. They ran out of men, so I had to step in to balance out the gender. Imagine a third date where your date is watching you chat up 10 other women, and she has a clipboard and a whistle. Talk about performance anxiety.
I talked to a few other women before my screen got stuck on “System searching for your next date.” Not the most graceful of endings. I’m sitting here wondering if another woman is going to pop up on my screen while I write this.
Then I realized that my hair looks terrible.
Features
The Find Matches features lets you select an age range and geographic boundary, 10, 50, 100 miles from my zip code in Boston. The broadest search showed seven matches total. Granted, I was 45 minutes late, but seven people 3,000 miles away? I would have stacked the deck and had a bunch of people at the ready.
Clicking on My Messages brings up a new window. What is this, 2001? Where is the AJAX-driven display? Why not just reload the side of the screen with my messages?
Invite friends and Crushes. This feature brings up a window asking me to enter in the usual Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail and AOL service login. No way, I have 400 email addresses in my Gmail account, can you imagine me accidentally inviting the executives from Match, eHarmony and Yahoo to a speed date? Main problem is that I didn’t know what the next step would be, and I wasn’t going to take any chances.
You can enter in email addresses of friends, which, had I known this, I would have asked a few to participate.
Just outta Beta
Speeddate.com is definitely just outta beta. The developers have a lot of work to do before mainstream daters warm up to the concept. Because it’s Friday and the Sox are in the playoffs, I’m going to outline some issues I came across and where improvements are necessary. Maybe karma will come back around and set me up on a great videodate.
The basic profile that I was asked to fill out was like an afterthought. They need to beef up profiles and ask for more information, which is going to be valuable to advertisers. Surprising that there were no ads wrapped around the experience. You know my gender, age and location, surely you can serve up some interesting ads.
Where was the option to display a link to my other dating site profiles, my Flickr photos?
Make the countdown timer more prominent on the page.
There is no alert that the webcam is going to turn on. Better be ready!
Where is the rating and the ranking?
What if I wanted to talk to men, or woman to woman? No option for that.
They need to ping my mobile and let me know about the event.
Need to add “why are you ending date” option for “bad connection”.
Sell webcams on the site. Between that at dating site affiliate programs, the site can be making money in no time.
Integrating Speeddate with a dating site seems like a straightforward process. My baseline for these types of services is Userplane, paste in a few lines of Javascript and you’re off to the races. We’ll see if they remain a standalone destination or partner up with dating sites.
Are the events going to be scheduled, or can I show up and hope that I’m matched with someone?
Just how will people be matched once there are more than eight people on the site at once? That’s why they need deeper profiles for people to search against.
It would be cool if I could have a business speed date with the readers of this blog. I’ll have to ask them if this is possible. I videochat in Yahoo messenger, iChat and Skype often. Skype audio and video is far superior to what I experienced tonight, but that’s only a matter of codecs and tweaking Flash.
Imagine a desktop taskbar widget that alerts me to the fact that I have speed date requests waiting for my approval. I would love that. I can’t wait to see their Facebook application.
I’ve been videochatting since 1995 and have joined every service out there. Overall, I have to say I was impressed with the experience, with the caveat that it feels like the people at Speeddate.com have not paid much attention to the services that have come and gone before them. I urge them to join a few services and see what else is out there and continue to add features and functionality, there is lots to be learned from the competition.
Check out Speeddate.com and let us know what you think.
