Yahoo is by far the largest dating site. PlentyOfFish, Match and SinglesNet combined don’t even come close to the number of singles on Yahoo. Let’s look at a few reasons why why Yahoo isn’t owning the market.
To compound how far Yahoo has fallen, remember that it has launched and shuttered several attempts at social networks. Now Yahoo is building out a new “social” platform and recently Yahoo rolled out new profiles, replacing ancient attempts at letting people describe themselves with a few links and some text. Tech Crunch says to go get our Shiny New Yahoo Profiles and was there when Yahoo Previewed Its New Application Platform.
Yahoo begins the rollout of its new user profile today, which marks the first tangible product release for the social part of the Yahoo Open Strategy, or YOS. The profile is one of the anchors (mail is the other) to Yahoo’s strategy of turning the site into one big social network.
Turns out they deleted everyone’s profile information, which upset people to no end. Not that there was much to delete, but still, unexpected. Update: turns out you can request your old profile data at Customer Care. This is a good example of what’s wrong with Yahoo. Who in the world approved the process of removing all data from profiles? I understand that with hundreds of millions of profiles, making changes is never easy, but it seems like Yahoo made a lot of mistakes that I wouldn’t have expected.
Yahoo is a champion at squandering opportunities and their stock price shows it. Morale is down, more layoffs are probably coming and the executive directory might as well be written on a whiteboard it changes so often. And that’s just Yahoo Personals.
Here’s my new profile, empty, oops!
The Managing your alias and profile post explaining the changes has 1,100 comments. Here’s the explanation of what happens when you start sharing data with third-party applications. And you though Facebook app data sharing was difficult to explain? I wonder how many comments the post explaining data sharing is going to have.
What Can Yahoo Do to Improve Dating?
Yahoo spent an enormous amount of time and energy upgrading their dating site platform. I spoke with Yahoo a year ago, about the upgrade, back when Susan Mernit was still around. Doesn’t seem like anything has changed in ages. Why go through the process of a massive infrastructure upgrade and do so little with it? At least they can start to achieve feature parity with the competition.
Yahoo has the largest number of profiles of any website. At the core, they should add a checkbox to your profile that let’s people self-identify as being single. Bingo, add tens of millions of singles to their database. If they make dating more social, which they should, they could tie lifestream data, Flickr photos, MyBlogLog communities and lots of data from other Yahoo properties. That’s where things start to get interesting.
I certainly hope someone at Yahoo Personals has the foresight, power and organizational skills to make this happen. It’s a great brand, the site looks great and works well, for the most part, but the lack of keeping up has me worried about it’s viability in the long term. Yahoo Personals started with a hell of a lot more going for it than any other dating site, but will it ever really flourish?
Otherwise we get to think about what it will be like if Microsoft runs Yahoo Personals (and how weird that would be because MS has a huge deal with Match.)
