Sarah Nordquist is the Community Manager of Infochimps, an Austin, Texas startup that seeks to democratize access to the world’s structured data. She contributed this guest post.
Online dating sites are a great way to meet that special someone. Forays into the world of online dating, however, are not without issues. User profiles can sound stilted and boring. Worse, you never know if that charming stranger is really a machinating creep. Steve Odom, founder of the new online dating site, Gelato, believes that incorporating social media can add authenticity and importantly, trust, to a dater’s profile.
Infochimps chatted with Steve recently about the value of merging social media and online dating profiles. “One of the problems with first dates,” Steve said “is high expectations leading to unsatisfactory outcomes. We read a static dating profile and dream up all sorts of inflated ideas of this person. ‘They are my soulmate’ from three paragraphs of boilerplate. Read someone’s Twitter profile for a couple of weeks and you’ll come away with a much richer understanding that person. That can allow daters to have more reasonable expectations going into a first date.”
Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace can be excellent sources for information about whether or not a person makes a good fit to date. The online dating industry needs to build tools and features that better tap these information streams so that we can get a more honest impression of a person. What if you could tell if someone was a serial monogamist versus a hardcore philanderer based on an analysis of their relationship history on Facbeook? What if you could tell at a glance that they were involved in an entire network of histrionic types based on their relationships and what they’ve said during, before and after them? The next generation of dating sites must implement features to help answer these questions if they want to empower their users beyond what they can do today.
Infochimps has been creating lots of datageek tools lately. While our API may not obviously relate to the world of online dating, we believe it can help the love set. One of our tools, Wordbag, mines a given Twitter user’s profile and generates a list of the most frequently tweeted words relative to other Twitter users. Put another way, it gives you the words that allow you to understand what makes a person an individual. A glance at someone’s wordbag has the potential to reveal all sorts of idiosyncrasies and fixations–content far more revealing than that provided by the simple tags featured on some dating sites.
In addition to our collection of tweets dating back to 2006, Infochimps has begun to harvest data off Myspace and Facebook. We have a simple demonstration of the Wordbag data here, and a simple way to measure whether or not a person is influential on Twitter here. We’d love to read your reactions to this data in the comments, and whether you have any feedback for what other types of data we could provide you to help navigate the online dating experience!
