PCWorld, of all publications, does a great job Analyzing the Algorithms of Attraction, asking the question, Just how do eHarmony, Plenty of Fish, True.com and PerfectMatch.com work under the hood?
I wish reporters would talk to different dating sites. Getting tired of hearing from the same few companies. There are many other interesting stories out there waiting to be told. That said, this is a *fantastic* article chuck-full of interesting factoids, a must-read if you haven’t already. Article has links to many other related topics.
Point of Interest
Eharmony stores 4 terabytes of data on some 20 million registered users on Oracle10G databases. One billion calculations every day. Based on Google’s MapReduce and Hadoop, both open source, nice. They use Netezza to do a lot of offline calculations to try to understand patterns and business intelligence about user behavior.
As an armchair technologist, this sort of talk gets me all hot and bothered. Dating startups, this is part of the reason why eHarmony succeeded. They live and breath on the data they collect on users each and every day. Set it and forget it dating sites are fine for niche sites, but big iron and computational gymnastics are what make the big sites successful.
Eharmony is using iovation to combat scammers.
True.com runs on a 64-bit… who cares. What *is* interesting is that True has staffers who constantly watch banks of security monitors that alternate between the 300 to 700 video chat sessions occurring at any one time. As if they are going to kick people off for more than an hour. Pretend you’re doing a service, but don’t really kick people off. If I show up on camera naked holding a shotgun, I’m back on in 60 minutes.
PlentyofFish operates on just three Web servers, five messaging servers and five database servers (the entire database is just 200GB in size), yet it serves up 200 billion pages a month to some 12 million users. “My entire cost is only a few hundred thousand dollars a year,” says Frind. The biggest piece isn’t the technology, he says, but the bandwidth required to keep traffic to the site flowing smoothly. Nice problem to have.
PerfectMatch.com risks becoming a hacker target, saying that “These are not the sharpest guys out there. They use the same techniques over and over.”
On the lack of traction of background checks in the online dating industry:
Other sites have been hesitant to embrace background checks. “Scammers use stolen credit cards all the time, so what good is a background check [on a stolen identity]? It’s more of a [marketing] gimmick than anything,” says Plenty of Fish’s Frind.
Dahl doesn’t think background checks are reliable. “There are hundreds of law enforcement databases that aren’t communicating with each other,” he says, adding that PerfectMatch does offer its users the option to buy background checks using a third-party service.
There is a big difference between background checks and identity verification, a common misconception reporters often fail to discuss. Identity verification, trust and reputation services are where online dating and social networking are going, give it a few years.
Dan Ariely, who researches ways to improve online dating, says matching algorithms are a placebo. He starts off saying that profile questions should ask about what people normally talk about when they first meet. Then he says people should be playing virtual games. I used to have high hopes for the role of casual gaming in online dating, now, not so much.
Online dating site visitors Snapshot: November 2008
* Total number of visitors to online dating sites: 22,274,000
* Male users: 52.4%
* Female users: 47.6%
Source: comScore Media Metrix
The top 5 types of abuse on online dating sites
1. Identity mining/phishing and/or 1-1 credit card fraud – 61%
2. Spam – 14%
3. Profile misrepresentation – 7.6%
4. General misconduct – 5.9%
5. Solicitation – 2.9%
Source: Iovation compilation of incidents from online dating sites using its security services
My hat goes off to Robert Mitchell. After a month of talking about the effects of the recession on online dating (zzzzz) it’s refreshing to see someone take the time to do a deep dive into what makes online dating tick.
