During the past year or so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about the role Facebook could play in online dating.
I’ve received a lot of feedback from the online dating industry about the possibility of Facebook becoming the worlds largest dating site. Typically I hear that:
– Facebook needs to focus on monitization strategies
– Facebook needs to focus on managing it’s tremendous growth
– There is not enough money in dating for Facebook get involved
– Privacy issues (See Dating Profiles Will Get Their Data From Facebook)
– And lots of other fear-driven reasons why Facebook will never becomes a serious dating platform.
I’m the first to agree that Facebook in it’s current form is not positioned to be a dating site. See You Got Your Match in My Facebook for more on this.
Searching for singles on Facebook around your age in your area code is difficult unless you spend some time figuring out how search works across networks (I may be missing something obvious here). Facebook says there are zero single women looking for men in Boston unless I search in the Boston, MA network. I don’t seem to be able to filter on Boston in the search results. I also can’t filter by age using the high school or college graduation date. I blame all of this on the fact that 200,000 join Facebook every day. They have better things to worry about than search functionality (but not for long).
All of this supports the fact that Facebook itself isn’t going to push into the dating space itself. It’s a platform and it’s job is to make it easy for third-party applications to provide features and functionalty the Facebook won’t/can’t take the time to develop.
Today, fbFund REV 2009 Finalist Thread, Formerly Frintro, Raises $1.2 Million (thanks to Inside Facebook). Thread is a Facebook Connect enabled dating site that allows users to meet friends of friends and/or play matchmaker by making introductions between your friends.
My neighbor Leah Busque, founder of RunMyErrand, turned me on to Thread. Leah was at the fbFund incubator this summer, along with Thread and many other amazing startups based on Facebook. Facebook is evolving as a platform, not only as a destination, and the incubator was a great way to support and fund the companies building out services based on FacebookConnect and the Facebook API.
Here is a Facebook Blog post from Brian Phillips, co-founder of Thread.
The basis for your company, Thread, is to introduce friends-of-friends on Facebook. How did you come up with the idea?
Personal experience. One of our co-founders, Skye Lee, is a consummate matchmaker. She loves nothing more than to set me up. A typical day: I’ll get a phone call from her before we even start thinking about business. “I just found this really cute girl on the street, and she’s single. You should take her to coffee next week. I told her all about you.” When we started to think about business ideas, it hit us — we should just make it easier to introduce people by applying cool technology like Facebook Connect.
Sound familiar? It’s Engage, built on top of Facebook. What Engage spent over $6 million dollars to develop, Thread can do for a million, actually a lot less.
Real online dating is coming to Facebook and it looks like Engage/Kismeet with Facebook Connect added to ease the signup process.
Back in December 2007 even Match got interested in friends matching friends. See Best Friends and Lovers for the latest serious Facebook dating application. Cablight is another “friends matching friends” application on Facebook.
For more on Thread see TechCrunch.
There are thousands of dating applications on Facebook. I’ve written about two of the most successful, Zoosk ($6 million raised) and Are You Interested (partnered with Match) many times. I like the companies, their management team and their shared passion for helping online dating evolve past the current static profile model of dating.
The problem is, the majority of serious daters are not using these applications, and the number of casual daters, while impressive when looking at Powerpoint slides in terms of adoption rates are tiny compared to Match or eHarmony and Yahoo Personals. Zoosk and Are You Interested talk about millions of installs and monthly users, but what of effectiveness? I don’t have numbers in front of me about how many successful relationships have occurred on either application, which I would presume would bolster my argument further. The reality is that when it comes to results, singles have fared better on traditional dating sites than social networks.
The argument quite often centers around Facebook dating applications copying the old Matchmaker model- many geogpaphic, political, religious and sexual-orientation niches within a large dating site. Don’t forget layering in features to make members anonymous during the matching process, because nobody wants to mix their personal peanut butter with their business chocolate.
There is little doubt in my mind that companies like Thread are going to figure this out, paving the way for more robust dating services built on Facebook that serious singles will warm to over time. How can you argue for the status quo big box dating sites and scores of unprofitable niche dating sites when Facebook has over 250 million users to choose from?
