Online dating sites function as a destination. Visit site, browse/search/wink/email/connect, rinse, repeat. Emails sent from dating sites always link back to the site itself, because it’s all about visitors and pageviews.
Technologies like Adobe Air, Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and other frameworks are currently being built out in order to create richer internet applications and bring the internet closer to the desktop.
Where are the examples of bringing dating to the desktop? Userplane has a desktop feature, whereby you are immediately alerted when someone messages you from other websites which implement the Userplane chat client.
Who else? I’d love to see more examples.
I’ve been thinking about how dating sites could create widgets that can be embedded on web pages and blogs. The kicker is that the people who show up in the widget on a particular site would be related to the content of the site.
Think about targeted advertising. Car ads on automotive sites for example. If I say I love muscle cars in my profile, my dating site’s widget on Car and Driver’s website would display women who have expressed interest in 1960’s gas guzzlers. Job sites do this all the time, making it easy to tailor the content of a display widget for a specific demographic.
Dating sites would be smart to attach metadata to profiles to make this possible, but it is doable.
While not exactly the desktop, dating sites are beginning to leverage a presence on various social networks.
However, for serious daters, we have got to break away from the countless permutations of site-specific HotOrNot and move the industry towards a new paradigm for discovering and facilitating communication between people.
Zoosk and “Are YOU Interested” are the early leaders in Facebook dating applications, but they are hardly game-changing in their current formats. I use both services often, preferring the functionality of Are YOU Interested, although Zoosk has promised that big things are coming in the near future. Both applications have plateaued, with little growth over the last several months.
After experimenting with Match’s Little Black Book and other dating applications on Facebook, I came away decidedly underwhelmed. They’re not on the desktop, but at least they’re experimenting with having a presence on other sites.
Match has an Apple Widget for browsing, but it’s broken, as is Match. Does that site ever work for you? I get error messages almost every time I visit the site.
Twitter has several very cool desktop clients and multiple services which freely pull user data, do interesting things with it and regurgitate it back to users. Dating sites hold on to their database with a vicelike grip. This has got to stop. There is even a Twitter-based service called TalkAboutADate.
Lately I’ve been paying attention to the Data Portability group, who’s goal is to empower people to control and own their data, as opposed to corporations owning your lifestream data and keeping it in walled-off gardens. Several companies are doing deals with dating sites to gain access to their member profiles, enabling them to be searched on third-party websites.
It’s time to start treating dating sites for what they really are, databases of personal information limited in functionality to the capabilities and vision of dating site operators and technology providers.
It’s time to make dating more social, between users and dating and social networking sites. What do you think?
