Facebook is again running into serious problems when it comes to clearly explaining their take on ownership of member data. This is a work in progress and they are going to need many iterations to get it right. It’s easy to talk about portable profiles, social graphs and all the other concepts that create the foundation of the open web, but getting 170 million people to agree on something is nigh impossible, they have to reach a common ground that satisfies the majority of members.
Speaking of privacy and data ownership, what does your dating site’s Terms of Service and Privacy Policy look like? I bet it’s the default that came with the script its built on, or a copy-paste job from eHarmony or Match. Now would be a good time to review clarify and revise.
I was thinking of doing a podcast where I would bring in people to highlight the cool profiles they have found on various dating sites. At what point would this violate the TOS for most dating sites? If you’re on a free site, I would think we have less to worry about. There is no paywall in place, it’s not being done for commercial purposes and publicity is good, right? Paid sites are another issue. Just ask Canoodle about that.
Canoodle is the latest company to attempt to become the Kayak of the online dating market. Kayak has 4.6 million unique visitors searching for the best travel deals. I’m sorry, tell me again why dating sites won’t open up their member feeds to third parties? I know some top 10 sites that do this on a very selective, case-by-case basis, but I’m talking about API-driven web services that any reasonably-vetted developer can consume. Hello, Amazon Web Services anyone?
I would even consider jumping into the game at that point, even only if for research purposes. I bet with a few of the right people on board that we could convert users better than the top 10 dating sites.
