Yesterday I speculated at length about Match.com’s plans for Facebook. Since then, several readers wrote in to point me to the Stir application by Match that recently launched on Facebook.
Match has taken a subset of its core functionality and is running it as an application on Facebook. Call it Match-Lite. Looks like it launched around June 15, with 5,642 monthly active users so far. More info at AppData.
Stir is a social dating application built just for Facebook users as a fun way to meet millions of singles in your area. Stir was built by Match.com, the leader in online dating, so you can be sure that your privacy will be protected.
Lets parse this statement. Stir, which is on its 3rd or 4th incarnation at this point, is the name of the app, yet I am asked to log into Match.com during the sign-in process and to further complicate things Stir displays my Match profile. Stir never really knew what it was and ended up a going.com clone for finding bars (or something). And now it’s not that, but its on Facebook, and its profiles are actually Match profiles.
And what is social dating? Spamming, I mean inviting, your friends to join Stir is not social. Thats viral K-Factor functionality and cheap acquisition costs. All good for Match but there is absolutely nothing social about Stir which was quite surprising.
Can I match my friends with each other? No. Can I recommend someone to my friends? No. Can I find a great place for a date? No. Can I check in on a date to earn points? No. Can I earn the equivalent of a Foursquare Mayorship? No. Can I perform tasks that make nearby people visible (in a safe manner)? No. Can friends vouch for friends? No. Read on to learn that the social/sharing button on Stir doesn’t even share profiles.
You simply can’t say you are social and then not feature anything even remotely social in terms of functionality. What’s going to get anyone to logging into Stir more than a few times?
Lets call it Match Lite for now.
I can imagine middle America starting with the app and wondering if they are on Facebook, Stir, Match or something else? Am I chatting with friends, hooking up with hotties, helping my buds meet women? What am I doing on Stir? At this point most people are going to bail and go back to Match.com.
Match went a long way to make Stir feel very similar to Match.com. Can you tell the difference between the Match.com and Stir screenshots below? I think this is a huge missed opportunity for Match. Stir originally was a chance for Match to break out of the “steady as she goes” mold. New people, new programmers, new design, new features, new functionality. And yet this latest reincarnation of Stir is a replica of Match on Facebook. Whats new here?
There are so many sites that I no longer visit directly. They all have Facebook apps, which are basically the site’s web pages embedded in a Facebook page.
Imagine if you could read your Match emails on Facebook and do just about everything else right inside Facebook? Turns out you can. I’m going to change my Match email address to my Facebook email so my Match messages show up there. We’ll see how that goes.
Match in Facebook, great. Save a few minutes a day and give me back some of the five hours a week we spend on Match.
We’ve watched Match mature over the years. We can’t be too hard on them this early in the game. But now is when we need to let them know right up front what we expect from them. The folks at Match are very smart. They can choose to evolve Stir into something thats actually fun and interesting to use and perhaps even remarkable in some way.
They have this baseline Stir app launched and could and build select awesome functionality on top of it. They can learn about leveraging the virality of certain social features.
If Match is serious about figuring out how to leverage social to improve matches I’m first in line to help. But if they come at Stir with the notion that its all about reducing customer acquisition costs, they deserve to fail (again). Match has had their Google moments of botched social launches. Now its time to get it right.
Singles are screaming from the rooftops for new types of online dating sites. Match can heed their call with Stir, or simply continue their global acquisition strategy and spend the next decade inching closer to the billion-dollar revenue mark. There is nothing wrong with that, but incremental growth is not very interesting from the outside.
Plenty of companies make money doing dating on Facebook, and more power to them. At some point the game is not solely about money and customers, its about improving the efficiency of the system. Because that will bring in more customers than any commercial or viral video or feature. Churn and burn is exhausting and usually unsustainable, ask any online marketing professional.
Will Facebook matter one iota to dating sites? The viral growth has all but evaporated now that Facebook has forced companies to buy ads. Perhaps Match crack the viral code and sign up another 100,000 paying members on Facebook. That would be a spectacular win for them. Speaking of new members, what role will Meetic have in all of this? Same goes for People Media and OkCupid. Will we see profiles from these sites on Stir? I hope so!
Lets talk more about the Stir features that stand out. Match Profiles on Facebook have a new share button. Unfortunately the share button leads to the friend invitation feature. Not what I expected. So much for a social dating application.
Present: Inbox, sent, winks, favorites, who’s viewed me. Ability to edit profile and photos.
Speaking of winks, I hope Match takes a page from the OkCupid playbook and enables or even forces people to add a twitter-like short msg to winks. Men who wink at women with no follow-up email are admitting they aren’t very clever and are generally frowned upon. So why does Match keep the feature as it is? This is a great way for Match to assert itself in going a bit out of the box and enforcing some best practices on members.
Some of the features don’t run in in an iframe on Facebook as usual. To edit your photos a new tab/window pops up with the Match.com photo editing page loaded. Awkward to change sites like that, especially in a new window. Either you are in Stir on Facebook or you are on Match. Mixing the two up is confusing.
Missing: Access to filtered email, advanced search such as mutual and reverse match. No ability to block people. Seriously?
One thing I noticed immediately is that I didn’t recognize any of the women presented to me in the search results. It would be great if Match could carry over my search criteria. Conversely, this could be a fantastic opportunity to show me new people. By new people I don’t mean relaxing search criteria, but some more edge cases that I might have passed on previously.
New: Newest Members, but what is that “1” on connections? Nothing is highlighted, thats a bug. Scratch that, newest members is accessible on Match.com, its tucked away on the search page.
Interesting that I saw “Find single BBW’s in your area” at the top of a search results page on Match. The profiles didn’t act like the usual ads when I moused over them, and seeking a distraction, I clicked and guess what it took me to People Media’s BBWPeopleMeet. One more click and my Match profile was copied over the the new site. That is slick!
These BBW women looked great so I clicked on them. Unfortunately all of them appear to be fake. At least take me to their profile page.
Back to Stir. Wondering about what Stir looks like if you are a non-paying Match member. Can you message other non-paying members on Stir? Need to investigate this. Please leave a comment if you have tried Stir as a non-paying Match member.
It would nice if Stir used keyboard shortcuts for navigating photos. I am still waiting for Cover Flow-style photo displays, but Stir does have forward-back buttons on the lightbox.
Look at the ads in the sidebar. As you can imagine, the sidebar ads, which for me are 99.9% singles ads everywhere else on Facebook, are actually targeted and useful. Angry Birds, how to launch a successful fan page and a few ads about blogging. Totally up my alley.
Lets talk type. The light gray text used in the Stir application is unreadable. There are amazing designers in the Match empire and they chose to launch with light grey text? To put it another way, they spent a huge amount of money and effort to re-launch Stir on Facebook and the text looks awful. There are also a number of font color issues. No dealbreakers but its called attention to detail.
Designers simply haven’t learned how to design html for Facebook yet. Or maybe I just demand a lot more from my apps than most people. Hello Google Web Fonts or the awesome TypeKit. Why do I even have to bring up typography?
Its going to be a problem to count visitors split between Facebook and Match.com, but I’m sure they will come up with something. Interesting to see how the new Stir affects Match’s overall traffic.
Will Stir drive new Match.com signups? Will Match network traffic go down once people realize they can manage their Match profile and email on Facebook? Which Match property will benefit the most from Stir? SeniorPeopleMeet makes sense or perhaps a Meetic property in Europe. How does Facebook ad revenue compare to Match.com site network revenue?
Could Match end up loosing money because Stir becomes too popular?
In closing, lets back up for a moment and look at the big picture. Stir is a month old, the code isn’t even dry yet. Facebook is a pain to develop for. Its like giving Gershwin a piano with 1/2 of the keys ripped out.
Match has been working their tails off for two years quietly accomplishing Big Things that are way ahead of every other dating company. I went to Match and heard their stories, saw what they are doing and came away impressed.
They are capable of doing great things and its going to take them a long time to figure out social. I don’t blame them for taking a few years off and letting Facebook settle down and users get into a routine before launching a new social dating app.
Its was risky to launch Match-Lite on Facebook with no social features. Stir has a long way to go before its even remotely interesting enough to attract signification attention.
I imagine the folks at Badoo, with 120 million members and a huge presence on Facebook, are watching Stir very closely.
Are you using Stir? What do you think?
