The well-funded geek squad at OkCupid Labs in NYC are entering the social discovery market with the launch of Tallygram.
With Tallygram, we’re utilizing the Facebook social graph, and our experiences with developing the world’s best and free online dating site, OkCupid, to explore and discover new relationships.
As someone who follows the social discovery space closely, I spend a lot of time on sites like Thecomplete.me and Likebright (I’m an advisor) and several others, many which seem to be not reachable today (pivots, took ball and went home, DNS problems?)
It was only a matter of time before the big boys in the dating industry started getting serious about mining the Facebook social graph.
The impact of their entrance into this corner of the dating industry is sure to shake up a few startups, but I see it as a good thing, validating the value of social networking for the entire dating industry.
OkCupid can dedicate considerable resources to developing a fresh platform that’s optimized for crunching and leveraging singles social exhaust, whereas most of the now-competition are small shops on small-ish budgets.
OkCupid has already solved the scalability issues of running a high-volume dating site, although Facebook is a moving target, and staying integrated and running smoothly is a challenge while Zuck is busy opening up API’s and deprecating others.
Running a niche site looks like a walk in the park compared to what Tallygram is getting into. It will be interesting to see how Tallygram deals with the orders-of-magnitude larger amounts of data coming from new matching algorithms, Facebook data and other information sure to be flooding their servers.
Tallygram may benefit from the IAC marketing machine. Just ask grindr how great it feels to be the darling of the dating press for a year, 10’s of thousands of free column-inches of PR can go a long way in establishing the presence of a new player in the dating space.
Tallygram is has an alpha version on Facebook and is up and running at Tallygram.com, its really raw right now, not pulling in a lot of Facebook data, broken images and the UI is a mess in places, but the overall design and early functionality is there and it looks great, nice and clean.
After a few minutes of review it’s clear that a lot of the functionality in Tallygram is pulled from OkCupid.com: search, friends/enemies %, etc. The question counter has four zero’s, I hope they will import my OkCupid questions! When browsing a profile, it shows if we have mutual friends, but its way too early to really get a sense of how the service performs, so I’m not going to go into great detail until they have pushed a few rev’s through the pipeline and the early bugs are squashed. Couple of screenshots in the meantime.
