There is no more effective way to get a sense of someones tastes, preferences and personality than a five minute video chat. Only companies really doing anything with video are SpeedDate, which is getting north of 1.5 million visitors a month and the young kids are using Woome. I haven’t used SpeedDate in a while, it’s $30/month and crashed on me in the middle of a date and froze my browser. It happens, especially on my Mac with Flash, but $30 is still too expensive, especially if I want to try it out for an hour or so.
Today I checked out Chateoulette (Often NSFW). It’s a dumbed-down version of WooMe, just go to the website, turn on cam, and a random stranger is immediately looking right at you, doing just about anything, and I mean anything.
OPW has a post about Match launching an Andriod mobile application. There is another post about Skyecandy, which is videodating via Skype. This has been done 10 times over in the past and hasn’t gone anywhere. Maybe Skycandy has something new in store for us.
I wonder if/when mobile apps will support streaming video? As I’ve always said, an online speed-date with audio and video is the best way to figure out if you want to go on a first date with someone. Mobile apps should be able to implement video chats easily. At home, cams need to be built into a higher percentage of laptops for this to make a significant impact on the dating market. And then there is the issue with people’s behavior. Video tends to bring out the nasty in people.
OmniDate does an end run around this problem by using Flash-based avatars. It’s been around a few years now and I’m waiting to hear some positive results from companies using the service. There has been some research, but where’s the business-case ROI? Are people sticking around on dating sites longer, is there advertising baked into the experience (where the real money is for a startup), are better, more long-lasting relationships resulting from companies using the service?
My SpeedDate time just dinged, gotta go.
