Dating Sites Don’t Know Their Customers (Why Search Is Broken)

Dating Sites Don’t Know Their Customers (Why Search Is Broken)
The majority of online dating companies know little about how people are using their sites. I had this thought while I was reading about Rearden Commerce, which just raised $100 million. Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden […]

The majority of online dating companies know little about how people are using their sites.

I had this thought while I was reading about Rearden Commerce, which just raised $100 million. Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden Commerce, is quietly emerging as major force among enterprise startups.

I am coming to New York. What does my Rearden Commerce personal assistant know about me? It knows I am a CEO of a Silicon Valley company, I will be staying downtown, I will be in midtown during the day, and it knows I like sushi.

Successful dating sites track many different metrics, but what do they actually know about their members and how they use the site?

• How many emails sent and to whom.
• Who is being bookmarked and winked at (everyone knows that winks are terrible, women NEVER respond to winks online. If you can't take the time to write an email, don't even bother unless you are fabulously handsome and not very bright.)
• Matchwords clicked on.
• Lot's of search data.
• And so on.

Obviously the list is much longer but you get my point.

Here's an incredible opportunity to improve the success rate for online daters by paying attention to how people use dating sites. Leveraging this data to empower singles to make better use of dating sites, better choices and increase the amount of interaction with other members.

Yet the majority of dating sites choose to do nothing.

Why do dating sites still have such rudimentary search functionality? How come Transparansee is the only company doing anything remotely interesting with dynamic search in the dating space?

Think about the search process. I enter in my search criteria or fire up a saved search, which I probably created months ago and have no idea what the search parameters are.

Browsing the results, I choose to click on a few people. Of those, I may email one or two and add a few more to my hotlist. What does a dating site learn about the people I click on in search results? How does that information relate to the people I actually email?

Why can't my search habits be used as fodder for emails from my dating site telling me to try new things? Why can't Match create a custom Saved Search based on how I use the site, restricting, relaxing or adding new search criteria based on my usage patterns?

How come I never get an email telling me to revise my saved searches? Why do I have to seek out and struggle through a generic FAQ/Help/Magazine to read editorial content and the same damn "10 steps towards better online dating."

Just because a dating site is intuitive doesn't mean people are going to use all the features, or explore to see how doing things differently may result in new experiences.

If I have 50 people in my hotlist, why doesn't my dating site tell me to either email 10 of them or decide to delete them from the list? Where is the proactive trigger helping me make better decisions and get the most out of the site?

Dating sites should know more about you than any other web property, yet they squander the opportunity to leverage this knowledge to make our lives easier.

I'm terrified to restrict the type of person I'm seeking in case I overdo it and am unable to see everyone that might be a good match. So I have to slog though the same people time and time again. I'm sure they are just as sick of seeing me as I am them.

It would be great if I could change the search criteria in real time with slider controls. As I move the slider towards brunette, the blondes disappear from the search results. Modulating the age range would expand and contract the amount of results right in front of me. No need to keep going back to the search page and clumsily changing parameters.

This is not very difficult to implement and would completely change the way we search for people. I'm barely scratching the surface here, so why aren't dating sites doing this kind of stuff?

If your dating site is based on packaged software or white label services, you're not going to see these kinds of features anytime soon. You basically get what they sell you. Sure you can customize features, but that gets prohibitively expensive.

So we're stuck relying on the top 20 dating sites to implement these kinds of features. Only they have so much bureaucracy, planning documents, development timelines, investors and brand identity issues to deal with, they are basically painted into a corner for the near-term.

Why offer improved search when that money could go to marketing? It's a good point but I still think that better functionality can win over new members more effectively than more marketing dollars.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then online dating search is insane. What do you think?

Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Facebook Mega-Update
Data portability is a hot topic amongst the digerati these days. while reading about FacebookConnect. I'm all for being able to display and access your own information across multiple sites. TechCrunch says Facebook to Open Source Facebook Platform. This is big news for sites looking to use Facebook user data and applications on their sites. How […]

Data portability is a hot topic amongst the digerati these days. while reading about FacebookConnect. I'm all for being able to display and access your own information across multiple sites.

TechCrunch says Facebook to Open Source Facebook Platform. This is big news for sites looking to use Facebook user data and applications on their sites. How many dating sites are going to integrate Facebook? What are the implications? Will it help dating sites grow and members stick around longer?

Remember Match had the first social network and they blew it, but it was a shot in the dark at the time. What if they partnered with Facebook instead of playing around with applications that about 17 people use? Deeper and tighter intergration between platforms is going to grow dating sites exponentially, but they don't quite get it yet. It's too bad the people that do tend to get it don't have the resources to make it happen and the marketing dollars to promote their efforts.

Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect. All of this datasharing openness is incredibly exciting but there are so many initiatives that it takes a wall chart to keep track of everything.

Facebook's, People You May Know is similar to many dating applications.

People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info. If you are already friends on Facebook with some people from your last job, for example, you may find some more of your former coworkers (assuming they are visible to you in search) among the "People You May Know' suggestions.

Q: What's to stop Facebook from creating a Dating group and/or application?

A: Not much.

Facebook could easily build out a dating section of the site. I'm sure they are paying attention to the advertising dollars that popular dating applications are pulling in. I guesstimate it to be $1 million or more per quarter. Small change at this point, but as Facebook's popularity continues to grow at 3% per month, how long until some internal team takes on dating?

Silicon Alley Insider says Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless and O'Reilly Radar shows us Facebook App Categories Ranked By Usage.

FlowingData did the graphs. Even more interesting is the second chart in the O'Reilly post.

Notice that the number of active dating application active users on Facebook is down. That's surprising.

As an example there are much fewer Dating apps than Sports apps, but Dating apps generate far more active users. Moreover, Messaging generates more active users than other "less useful" categories, and has grown the fastest over the last month.

Andrew Chen on why Facebook applications are focused on fun instead of utility.

20bits says slowing developer access to Facebook platform groups indicates growth is slowing .

AllFacebook Dating Category.

Facebooking101 has a list of useful dating applications on Facebook.

Facebook Dater , a forum for Facebook dating.

VentureBeat on Watercooler: Yet another social network app company that’s making money. Water cooler has 700 applications and gets about 2,000 new posts, more than 5,000 trivia quiz questions answered and more than 1,500 new notes from fans every day.

Two interesting Facebook screenshots below. One is Are You Interested, which I hit like a crack pipe and actually met some good people. I am scratching my head trying to figure out why the link that says "This is a Match member" does not link to their Match profile. They're half-way to a decent partnership, let's see some links.

I have to say I prefer AYI over Zoosk these days, better interface and loads faster and twice as many people on it. Zoosk needs to step it up if they are going to stay competitive.

Second shot is from SinglesNet. Three naked women who look practically underage. SinglesNet is a kissing cousin to True.com's skinvertising, although I do get emails more frequently from people saying they met someone on Singlesnet which is heartening to hear. but come on guys, how about raising the bar a bit? I know it's scary but Singlesnet could truly innovate the industry in a way that Match or PlentyofFish can't if they rebranded the company and added a few features to the site. Right now it's a step above Craigslist in terms of functionality.

Glad to get this onto the blog. Let's hear what you have to say in the comments.

Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Strong women, stronger men
Hey guys, In the last 20 years, society has changed a lot. Women are starting to be more aggressive in business, and in romance, and I for one think that's a very good thing. However, some guys are either frightened…
Source: www.johnalanis.com

How to broadcast a “tractor beam” that pulls women right to you
Hey guys, When I started this womenapproachyou business exactly four years ago, it was mostly about building "automatic attraction systems"–autopilot systems that put you in a position where women were forced to come to you due to the environment. Now,…
Source: www.johnalanis.com

Dating Sites Don’t Know Their Customers (Why Search Is Broken)
The majority of online dating companies know little about how people are using their sites. I had this thought while I was reading about Rearden Commerce, which just raised $100 million. Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden […]

The majority of online dating companies know little about how people are using their sites.

I had this thought while I was reading about Rearden Commerce, which just raised $100 million. Patrick Grady has spent the past eight years of his life building the ultimate personal Web assistant in relative obscurity. But now his company, Rearden Commerce, is quietly emerging as major force among enterprise startups.

I am coming to New York. What does my Rearden Commerce personal assistant know about me? It knows I am a CEO of a Silicon Valley company, I will be staying downtown, I will be in midtown during the day, and it knows I like sushi.

Successful dating sites track many different metrics, but what do they actually know about their members and how they use the site?

• How many emails sent and to whom.
• Who is being bookmarked and winked at (everyone knows that winks are terrible, women NEVER respond to winks online. If you can't take the time to write an email, don't even bother unless you are fabulously handsome and not very bright.)
• Matchwords clicked on.
• Lot's of search data.
• And so on.

Obviously the list is much longer but you get my point.

Here's an incredible opportunity to improve the success rate for online daters by paying attention to how people use dating sites. Leveraging this data to empower singles to make better use of dating sites, better choices and increase the amount of interaction with other members.

Yet the majority of dating sites choose to do nothing.

Why do dating sites still have such rudimentary search functionality? How come Transparansee is the only company doing anything remotely interesting with dynamic search in the dating space?

Think about the search process. I enter in my search criteria or fire up a saved search, which I probably created months ago and have no idea what the search parameters are.

Browsing the results, I choose to click on a few people. Of those, I may email one or two and add a few more to my hotlist. What does a dating site learn about the people I click on in search results? How does that information relate to the people I actually email?

Why can't my search habits be used as fodder for emails from my dating site telling me to try new things? Why can't Match create a custom Saved Search based on how I use the site, restricting, relaxing or adding new search criteria based on my usage patterns?

How come I never get an email telling me to revise my saved searches? Why do I have to seek out and struggle through a generic FAQ/Help/Magazine to read editorial content and the same damn "10 steps towards better online dating."

Just because a dating site is intuitive doesn't mean people are going to use all the features, or explore to see how doing things differently may result in new experiences.

If I have 50 people in my hotlist, why doesn't my dating site tell me to either email 10 of them or decide to delete them from the list? Where is the proactive trigger helping me make better decisions and get the most out of the site?

Dating sites should know more about you than any other web property, yet they squander the opportunity to leverage this knowledge to make our lives easier.

I'm terrified to restrict the type of person I'm seeking in case I overdo it and am unable to see everyone that might be a good match. So I have to slog though the same people time and time again. I'm sure they are just as sick of seeing me as I am them.

It would be great if I could change the search criteria in real time with slider controls. As I move the slider towards brunette, the blondes disappear from the search results. Modulating the age range would expand and contract the amount of results right in front of me. No need to keep going back to the search page and clumsily changing parameters.

This is not very difficult to implement and would completely change the way we search for people. I'm barely scratching the surface here, so why aren't dating sites doing this kind of stuff?

If your dating site is based on packaged software or white label services, you're not going to see these kinds of features anytime soon. You basically get what they sell you. Sure you can customize features, but that gets prohibitively expensive.

So we're stuck relying on the top 20 dating sites to implement these kinds of features. Only they have so much bureaucracy, planning documents, development timelines, investors and brand identity issues to deal with, they are basically painted into a corner for the near-term.

Why offer improved search when that money could go to marketing? It's a good point but I still think that better functionality can win over new members more effectively than more marketing dollars.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then online dating search is insane. What do you think?

Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Facebook Mega-Update
Data portability is a hot topic amongst the digerati these days. while reading about FacebookConnect. I'm all for being able to display and access your own information across multiple sites. TechCrunch says Facebook to Open Source Facebook Platform. This is big news for sites looking to use Facebook user data and applications on their sites. How […]

Data portability is a hot topic amongst the digerati these days. while reading about FacebookConnect. I'm all for being able to display and access your own information across multiple sites.

TechCrunch says Facebook to Open Source Facebook Platform. This is big news for sites looking to use Facebook user data and applications on their sites. How many dating sites are going to integrate Facebook? What are the implications? Will it help dating sites grow and members stick around longer?

Remember Match had the first social network and they blew it, but it was a shot in the dark at the time. What if they partnered with Facebook instead of playing around with applications that about 17 people use? Deeper and tighter intergration between platforms is going to grow dating sites exponentially, but they don't quite get it yet. It's too bad the people that do tend to get it don't have the resources to make it happen and the marketing dollars to promote their efforts.

Facebook Responds To MySpace With Facebook Connect. All of this datasharing openness is incredibly exciting but there are so many initiatives that it takes a wall chart to keep track of everything.

Facebook's, People You May Know is similar to many dating applications.

People You May Know looks at, among other things, your current friend list and their friends, your education info and your work info. If you are already friends on Facebook with some people from your last job, for example, you may find some more of your former coworkers (assuming they are visible to you in search) among the "People You May Know' suggestions.

Q: What's to stop Facebook from creating a Dating group and/or application?

A: Not much.

Facebook could easily build out a dating section of the site. I'm sure they are paying attention to the advertising dollars that popular dating applications are pulling in. I guesstimate it to be $1 million or more per quarter. Small change at this point, but as Facebook's popularity continues to grow at 3% per month, how long until some internal team takes on dating?

Silicon Alley Insider says Confirmed: Facebook Apps Are Useless and O'Reilly Radar shows us Facebook App Categories Ranked By Usage.

FlowingData did the graphs. Even more interesting is the second chart in the O'Reilly post.

Notice that the number of active dating application active users on Facebook is down. That's surprising.

As an example there are much fewer Dating apps than Sports apps, but Dating apps generate far more active users. Moreover, Messaging generates more active users than other "less useful" categories, and has grown the fastest over the last month.

Andrew Chen on why Facebook applications are focused on fun instead of utility.

20bits says slowing developer access to Facebook platform groups indicates growth is slowing .

AllFacebook Dating Category.

Facebooking101 has a list of useful dating applications on Facebook.

Facebook Dater , a forum for Facebook dating.

VentureBeat on Watercooler: Yet another social network app company that’s making money. Water cooler has 700 applications and gets about 2,000 new posts, more than 5,000 trivia quiz questions answered and more than 1,500 new notes from fans every day.

Two interesting Facebook screenshots below. One is Are You Interested, which I hit like a crack pipe and actually met some good people. I am scratching my head trying to figure out why the link that says "This is a Match member" does not link to their Match profile. They're half-way to a decent partnership, let's see some links.

I have to say I prefer AYI over Zoosk these days, better interface and loads faster and twice as many people on it. Zoosk needs to step it up if they are going to stay competitive.

Second shot is from SinglesNet. Three naked women who look practically underage. SinglesNet is a kissing cousin to True.com's skinvertising, although I do get emails more frequently from people saying they met someone on Singlesnet which is heartening to hear. but come on guys, how about raising the bar a bit? I know it's scary but Singlesnet could truly innovate the industry in a way that Match or PlentyofFish can't if they rebranded the company and added a few features to the site. Right now it's a step above Craigslist in terms of functionality.

Glad to get this onto the blog. Let's hear what you have to say in the comments.

Source: feeds.feedburner.com

Strong women, stronger men
Hey guys, In the last 20 years, society has changed a lot. Women are starting to be more aggressive in business, and in romance, and I for one think that's a very good thing. However, some guys are either frightened…
Source: www.johnalanis.com

How to broadcast a “tractor beam” that pulls women right to you
Hey guys, When I started this womenapproachyou business exactly four years ago, it was mostly about building "automatic attraction systems"–autopilot systems that put you in a position where women were forced to come to you due to the environment. Now,…
Source: www.johnalanis.com