Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Monday, February 19, 2007
Those liars who know its wrong
Research we have covered tells us that 25% of the community thinks telling "white lies" is okay online, but about 50% do it.
Hard to say where to come down on this. It is wrong to lie on an internet dating site. But a lot of people are lonely and desperate and likely feel they need to lie. Seeing on the women on match.com and datingdirect.com who flattly say "no bald guys" I would imagine shallowness and lies run in both directions.
Generally lies about physical size will soon enough be resolved if the two parties ever meet. From talking with friends I know that most experienced online daters have had a size shock, but its something that's clear. If I made a profile listing my weight as 145 pounds you would not be able to hold your dinner down on meeting me.
But we can only think about the big lies that are going on: marriage status, number of children, and other lies that get told later but are not on a profile like HIV status or last HIV test.
But we do live in a world of lies
Hard to say where to come down on this. It is wrong to lie on an internet dating site. But a lot of people are lonely and desperate and likely feel they need to lie. Seeing on the women on match.com and datingdirect.com who flattly say "no bald guys" I would imagine shallowness and lies run in both directions.
Generally lies about physical size will soon enough be resolved if the two parties ever meet. From talking with friends I know that most experienced online daters have had a size shock, but its something that's clear. If I made a profile listing my weight as 145 pounds you would not be able to hold your dinner down on meeting me.
But we can only think about the big lies that are going on: marriage status, number of children, and other lies that get told later but are not on a profile like HIV status or last HIV test.
But we do live in a world of lies
Liar Liar
Summary: In this article we learn that that other person is probably shorter if they are a guy, almost certainly heavier, but most likely the age their profiel says.
Online Dating Persona Differs From Reality
Source
By Therese LahlouhFeb 16 2007
Skeptical about looking for love online? A new study by Prof. Jeffrey Hancock, communication and information science, and Catalina Toma grad lays out the truths and misconceptions about online dating.
Toma and Hancock decided to try a new research technique to match up the daters’ profiles to their actual appearances: they weighed them, measured their height and obtained their age from their driver’s licenses. This method differs from earlier studies because the researchers are actually taking the measurements themselves, instead of asking the participants to come clean about their measurements — or their lies.
“You can never tell if someone is telling the truth about their lies,” Hancock said.Collecting the data proved to be no easy task. It took nearly six months to recruit 80 participants from the New York City area who used the online websites Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles and Webdate. Toma then had to persuade participants to get on a scale and take part in a two-hour meeting. The incentive was $30.They found that 52.6 percent of men and 39 percent of women lied about their height. In terms of weight, 64.1 percent of women and 60.5 percent of men altered reality for the virtual dating scene. Age was less of an issue, with 24.3 percent of the men and 13.1 percent of the women providing incorrect information.
“People lied a lot, but that means they lied often but not by much,” Hancock said.In most cases, height was rounded up by half an inch, and weight was rounded down between five to ten pounds. The further a person deviated from an average weight for their height, the larger the person’s lie tended to be.
Toma and Hancock discovered that while people were obviously lying to appear more appealing to the opposite sex, they also needed to be relatively honest because they expect a face-to-face meeting. The daters needed to strike a delicate balance between these two concerns in order to succeed in the online dating world.
The reasoning behind the fibs was explained in part by Toma, who defined the two main trains of thought surrounding this behavior. People want to present themselves as well as they can in order to appeal to the opposite sex. However, they are also seeking unconditional acceptance and want to be loved for who they really are.
“They are forced to balance these ideals by lying marginally, but frequently,” Toma said.The need to lie is stimulated by evolutionary behavior, according to Toma and Hancock. For example, women naturally seek the strongest man who will be able to protect and provide for the family, so taller, wealthier men are more attractive. Both men and women are in tune to the subliminal desires of the opposite sex, and alter their profiles to appeal to this primal instinct, according to Hancock.
When asked how much they had lied, “people were relatively up front about it,” Hancock said. Often there are publicized cases of gross exaggerations in online profiles, but in the long run, most of the daters’ motives were good, according to Toma.
Does this mean that online dating should be sworn off as a collection of deceptive traps? Not necessarily. When asked if he would participate in online dating after conducting this research, Hancock replied with no hesitation, “Yes, definitely.”
Online Dating Persona Differs From Reality
Source
By Therese LahlouhFeb 16 2007
Skeptical about looking for love online? A new study by Prof. Jeffrey Hancock, communication and information science, and Catalina Toma grad lays out the truths and misconceptions about online dating.
Toma and Hancock decided to try a new research technique to match up the daters’ profiles to their actual appearances: they weighed them, measured their height and obtained their age from their driver’s licenses. This method differs from earlier studies because the researchers are actually taking the measurements themselves, instead of asking the participants to come clean about their measurements — or their lies.
“You can never tell if someone is telling the truth about their lies,” Hancock said.Collecting the data proved to be no easy task. It took nearly six months to recruit 80 participants from the New York City area who used the online websites Match.com, Yahoo Personals, American Singles and Webdate. Toma then had to persuade participants to get on a scale and take part in a two-hour meeting. The incentive was $30.They found that 52.6 percent of men and 39 percent of women lied about their height. In terms of weight, 64.1 percent of women and 60.5 percent of men altered reality for the virtual dating scene. Age was less of an issue, with 24.3 percent of the men and 13.1 percent of the women providing incorrect information.
“People lied a lot, but that means they lied often but not by much,” Hancock said.In most cases, height was rounded up by half an inch, and weight was rounded down between five to ten pounds. The further a person deviated from an average weight for their height, the larger the person’s lie tended to be.
Toma and Hancock discovered that while people were obviously lying to appear more appealing to the opposite sex, they also needed to be relatively honest because they expect a face-to-face meeting. The daters needed to strike a delicate balance between these two concerns in order to succeed in the online dating world.
The reasoning behind the fibs was explained in part by Toma, who defined the two main trains of thought surrounding this behavior. People want to present themselves as well as they can in order to appeal to the opposite sex. However, they are also seeking unconditional acceptance and want to be loved for who they really are.
“They are forced to balance these ideals by lying marginally, but frequently,” Toma said.The need to lie is stimulated by evolutionary behavior, according to Toma and Hancock. For example, women naturally seek the strongest man who will be able to protect and provide for the family, so taller, wealthier men are more attractive. Both men and women are in tune to the subliminal desires of the opposite sex, and alter their profiles to appeal to this primal instinct, according to Hancock.
When asked how much they had lied, “people were relatively up front about it,” Hancock said. Often there are publicized cases of gross exaggerations in online profiles, but in the long run, most of the daters’ motives were good, according to Toma.
Does this mean that online dating should be sworn off as a collection of deceptive traps? Not necessarily. When asked if he would participate in online dating after conducting this research, Hancock replied with no hesitation, “Yes, definitely.”
Sunday, February 4, 2007
Still Not Everywhere
In a pub in Salsiburry this week I meet a girl who said to her friends that tehy shouldn't not let on that a woman they were going to meet had meet her new boyfriend on the internet.
Thats just so 2006.
Bob Hooker
Thats just so 2006.
Bob Hooker
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Vision of a Perfect Dating Site
Things we noticed that should make a perfect site.
Firstly you want to date people near you. This site should model people by where they live, where they work and how far they travel.
Honesty should be promoted. We suspect many of the people on the dating sites looking for partners are just looking for quick fucks. I like Plenty of Fish ability to search a large body of users by specific interests. So if you want a one night stand in Plenty of Fish you can just say it.
So by applying filters one can be searching those looking for soul mates who will take 6 months to kiss, or for a one night stand. Our site would allow filters for a wide set of bonding from just friends for fast fucks, in a professional fashion. This should promote honesty since you can find people who are open and up front about what they want, and keep people with different goals away from each other.
The site would have a lot of community spaces for chats and also allow users to develop games to interact. This would promote community discovery of partners.
With a system based on collaboration and discovery, and not forms matching. This system would have less forms, which are just places to lie anyways.
Probably 5 photo requirements. Photos should be dated with a digital signature, so it would be nice if everyone had a digital camera and uploaded via that.
The site would not direct people to put in their idea match. Rather they would answer some questions which would provide a profile, not fill out fields. They would then express their goals in going on the site. From there the site would guide the users to collaborative spaces of chat rooms, online games, photosharing, and other things that would promote discovery.
So if anyone wants to hire me as an online consulting just leave a comment
Bob Hooker
Firstly you want to date people near you. This site should model people by where they live, where they work and how far they travel.
Honesty should be promoted. We suspect many of the people on the dating sites looking for partners are just looking for quick fucks. I like Plenty of Fish ability to search a large body of users by specific interests. So if you want a one night stand in Plenty of Fish you can just say it.
So by applying filters one can be searching those looking for soul mates who will take 6 months to kiss, or for a one night stand. Our site would allow filters for a wide set of bonding from just friends for fast fucks, in a professional fashion. This should promote honesty since you can find people who are open and up front about what they want, and keep people with different goals away from each other.
The site would have a lot of community spaces for chats and also allow users to develop games to interact. This would promote community discovery of partners.
With a system based on collaboration and discovery, and not forms matching. This system would have less forms, which are just places to lie anyways.
Probably 5 photo requirements. Photos should be dated with a digital signature, so it would be nice if everyone had a digital camera and uploaded via that.
The site would not direct people to put in their idea match. Rather they would answer some questions which would provide a profile, not fill out fields. They would then express their goals in going on the site. From there the site would guide the users to collaborative spaces of chat rooms, online games, photosharing, and other things that would promote discovery.
So if anyone wants to hire me as an online consulting just leave a comment
Bob Hooker
More on the wine and companies and open source
Looking through plenty of fish I was able to do searches on wine. The plenty of fish community at this point is perhaps a little more raunchy than say Match.com, but our experience is that pay services communities tend to be too cautious and conservative so its a wash there.
So is there any reason for a wine lovers dating service? Well granted the wine lovers service has a lot more information about wine on it, with lots of articles, and lots of money on advertising and it looks nice. Perhaps its a bit over designed, you might just want to search wine on a dating site?
It comes down to corporate efforts to keep the subscriptions coming in to these services. A site like plenty of fish makes its creator a million of so dollars a year through google ads, which would be nothing compared to the massive companies that are merging around dating services which collect maybe $300 a year from member just in usage fees, and then ads, and then the ability to sell the information to marketing firms.
Of course everything on Plenty of Fish is right there for Google and Yahoo to collect. People who don't marry live shorter lives than people who do, would you want your insurance company collecting a record of your online dating over say 20 years when making a life insurance policy? Of course they can aske are you married already, but I suspect patterns of dating posts will establish a great deal more about someone that could be used to predict life span and sickness history.
But lets put the issue of data security aside.
Essentially if everyone was on something like plenty of fish, if people used tags and tag searching, and took precautions they should take with any dating site there would probably be no need for specialized sites or even pay sites. As of today I see nothing that the pay sites offer to make them worth their money AND since they are directing to the more cautious market segment with more money they tend to be full of old people who couldn't make it work in the real world for 20 years. (No offense I hope)
Chemistry.com claims to have some anthropological information to help more advance pair discovery but we can't see it yet. You have to answer a lot of questions.
The thing about plenty of fish is that it just feels low class, real low class. I am looking for open source free online dating sites that have skinned themselves a bit better and allow users to make ad on functions. Also more FILTERS. There is a need for community policing and removing of cons.
I think massive sites with tags and community areas that allow people to browse and discover are better than forms based matching sites. I am also becoming more and more suspect about how motivated professional sites are to actually developing working relationships.
But right now to be honest plenty of fish looks awful, is full on non-pictures, most of the pictures are clearly not of the people or not from this century, and the tool is not very personal. By that I mean it does not keep state information about you. For example if you search on the UK it should probably keep a state variable that you are looking to date in the UK unless told otherwise. But when you click a tag on a person it takes you to the tag poll for the entire global community. Real useful. Search is suppose to allow fine tuning, but this keeps taking you back to the top.
It also is always sending you to the US by default, the entire US. Maybe in 50 people will be dating globally but it is not happening right now.
So is there any reason for a wine lovers dating service? Well granted the wine lovers service has a lot more information about wine on it, with lots of articles, and lots of money on advertising and it looks nice. Perhaps its a bit over designed, you might just want to search wine on a dating site?
It comes down to corporate efforts to keep the subscriptions coming in to these services. A site like plenty of fish makes its creator a million of so dollars a year through google ads, which would be nothing compared to the massive companies that are merging around dating services which collect maybe $300 a year from member just in usage fees, and then ads, and then the ability to sell the information to marketing firms.
Of course everything on Plenty of Fish is right there for Google and Yahoo to collect. People who don't marry live shorter lives than people who do, would you want your insurance company collecting a record of your online dating over say 20 years when making a life insurance policy? Of course they can aske are you married already, but I suspect patterns of dating posts will establish a great deal more about someone that could be used to predict life span and sickness history.
But lets put the issue of data security aside.
Essentially if everyone was on something like plenty of fish, if people used tags and tag searching, and took precautions they should take with any dating site there would probably be no need for specialized sites or even pay sites. As of today I see nothing that the pay sites offer to make them worth their money AND since they are directing to the more cautious market segment with more money they tend to be full of old people who couldn't make it work in the real world for 20 years. (No offense I hope)
Chemistry.com claims to have some anthropological information to help more advance pair discovery but we can't see it yet. You have to answer a lot of questions.
The thing about plenty of fish is that it just feels low class, real low class. I am looking for open source free online dating sites that have skinned themselves a bit better and allow users to make ad on functions. Also more FILTERS. There is a need for community policing and removing of cons.
I think massive sites with tags and community areas that allow people to browse and discover are better than forms based matching sites. I am also becoming more and more suspect about how motivated professional sites are to actually developing working relationships.
But right now to be honest plenty of fish looks awful, is full on non-pictures, most of the pictures are clearly not of the people or not from this century, and the tool is not very personal. By that I mean it does not keep state information about you. For example if you search on the UK it should probably keep a state variable that you are looking to date in the UK unless told otherwise. But when you click a tag on a person it takes you to the tag poll for the entire global community. Real useful. Search is suppose to allow fine tuning, but this keeps taking you back to the top.
It also is always sending you to the US by default, the entire US. Maybe in 50 people will be dating globally but it is not happening right now.
Merger Madness Hits Online Dating
As online dating becomes bigger and bigger business very rapidly this story shows just how much of a business online dating now is.
PARIS (Reuters) - Continental Europe's leading online dating agency Meetic said on Monday it was close to concluding a friendly takeover of British peer, DatingDirect.
"This accord should be finalised in the course of January 2007, following the lifting of the last suspensive clauses," Meetic, which is based near Paris, said in a statement.
Meetic founder and chairman Marc Simoncini said the takeover would allow the company to enter the U.K. market without the need for an expensive
"Thanks to this acquisition we will have conquered in less than five years the leading position on most of the international markets on which we operate," Simoncini said in a statement.
The group, already present in 14 European countries and China and Brazil, planned to expand further in 2007, he added.
SOURCE
The big story in online dating is not going to be take on, and its not going to be about how unhappy people become happy via online dating, or how love and marriage is changed via the Internet. 2007 will be the year that large corporations, people like GE and Microsof start to take over the business of dating.
Maybe its time to go back to the bar.
Even ever a case for open source free dating sites could be made, its the fairly disturbing concept that MBAs from massive companies could be deciding how people are paired up soon.
technorati tags:Online, dating, DatingDirect, Merger
Blogged with Flock
Friday, January 5, 2007
Our New Mission
When we starting .dating online dating was still rather new, after all it was about 8 months ago, ages and ages on the Internet.
Our interest was as much to promote what I saw as a valid new social activity that promised to help build community as anything, certainly that was a bigger gain than any money made via adsense.
The site has been fun watching something start out small suddenly become an established part of life, and from the perspective of this blog I got to watch it happen.
But now that 25,000,000 Americans a year visit online dating sites the issue is not getting it going, its monitoring the good, bad and ugly.
So we are extending our mission to look more and more at negatives of online. When we started the negatives were simple:
1. It might not work.
2. I will meet freaks and losers.
3. Everyone will think I'm a freak or loser.
Safety was the greatest issue, as it remains so today. But new dangers are emerging:
1. Online dating sites may work to built more shallow short term relationships with the promise of always someone new in the aim of extending subscriptions. You may become less likely to find love.
2. Companies may use online dating services to collect marketing data or promote products, specifically alcohol and tobacco consumption.
3. Dating by matching does not work, we need to discover someone who has things we didn't even know we wanted. People have to learn what they are looking for in the process of meeting people, they don't just get matched up on the print out.
4. Online dating could be a form of government, business, and other jerks getting to know sensitive information about you.
5. I like Microsoft, but I don't see why companies that big have an interest in online dating.
With online dating established I am going to be a bit more critical of the trends that are going on, more social studies and less cheerleading. Online dating is here to stay, it does not need promoting but watching.
Our interest was as much to promote what I saw as a valid new social activity that promised to help build community as anything, certainly that was a bigger gain than any money made via adsense.
The site has been fun watching something start out small suddenly become an established part of life, and from the perspective of this blog I got to watch it happen.
But now that 25,000,000 Americans a year visit online dating sites the issue is not getting it going, its monitoring the good, bad and ugly.
So we are extending our mission to look more and more at negatives of online. When we started the negatives were simple:
1. It might not work.
2. I will meet freaks and losers.
3. Everyone will think I'm a freak or loser.
Safety was the greatest issue, as it remains so today. But new dangers are emerging:
1. Online dating sites may work to built more shallow short term relationships with the promise of always someone new in the aim of extending subscriptions. You may become less likely to find love.
2. Companies may use online dating services to collect marketing data or promote products, specifically alcohol and tobacco consumption.
3. Dating by matching does not work, we need to discover someone who has things we didn't even know we wanted. People have to learn what they are looking for in the process of meeting people, they don't just get matched up on the print out.
4. Online dating could be a form of government, business, and other jerks getting to know sensitive information about you.
5. I like Microsoft, but I don't see why companies that big have an interest in online dating.
With online dating established I am going to be a bit more critical of the trends that are going on, more social studies and less cheerleading. Online dating is here to stay, it does not need promoting but watching.
WineLoversMeet.com - A Free Dating Site for People Who Enjoy Wine
LINK
About WineLoversMeet.com:
The site claims to be the fasted growing relationship site on the Internet, which means it has started small recently.
The trend to more specialists dating sites may please those few people who want a relationship with someone based on some combined interest. Though I would generally consider this to be politics, art, outdoors activities, veganism, religion, or area. Generally online sites match people on items, so a site dedicated to only people with a certain interest is not really gaining you over searching a larger site for people of that interest. Of course this site is free, but I would imagine the information collected is being sold to alcohol distribution companies, so its far from free when its being used to find out about couple who drink too much.
Frankly this site looks fishy. You could search say match.com or any of the free sites for people with wine as an interest. This site looks like it is trying to collect data about wine drinking and then track their social interactions with aim of marketing and potentially influencing people.
It is my experience that wine drinkers can be major problem alcoholics, mostly because wine drinking can be a vice passing itself off as a high class activity. This site smell like a effort to promote this. I frankly don't see how a smokers dating service would be any different.
Oh by the way the smokers online dating services I know about are
Datingforsmokers.com
Smoking Passions
There are also a lot of subsites that are free for smokers on other of the thousands of dating sites out there.
These all look like advertising and marketing hiding as online dating. Many people quit smoking or drinking when they start dating someone who does not and its certainly in many companies best interest to get like vices together.
In my opinion avoid them all.
Robert Hooker
About WineLoversMeet.com:
WineLoversMeet.com is a new concept in online dating designed specifically for people who enjoy wine. You don't have to be a wine connoisseur to become a member. Just as long as you have some general enthusiasm for the great taste of wine. What does wine have to do with dating? As you know, people enjoy associating with others who share the same common interests. Some wine enthusiasts tend to be fanatical about their passion for wine which is why this site was created. Another great advantage to this concept is that wine lovers usually tend to be among the most classy and sophisticated individuals within society. It's hard enough to connect with singles that you're compatible with. They've just narrowed the playing field a bit.
The site claims to be the fasted growing relationship site on the Internet, which means it has started small recently.
The trend to more specialists dating sites may please those few people who want a relationship with someone based on some combined interest. Though I would generally consider this to be politics, art, outdoors activities, veganism, religion, or area. Generally online sites match people on items, so a site dedicated to only people with a certain interest is not really gaining you over searching a larger site for people of that interest. Of course this site is free, but I would imagine the information collected is being sold to alcohol distribution companies, so its far from free when its being used to find out about couple who drink too much.
Frankly this site looks fishy. You could search say match.com or any of the free sites for people with wine as an interest. This site looks like it is trying to collect data about wine drinking and then track their social interactions with aim of marketing and potentially influencing people.
It is my experience that wine drinkers can be major problem alcoholics, mostly because wine drinking can be a vice passing itself off as a high class activity. This site smell like a effort to promote this. I frankly don't see how a smokers dating service would be any different.
Oh by the way the smokers online dating services I know about are
Datingforsmokers.com
Smoking Passions
There are also a lot of subsites that are free for smokers on other of the thousands of dating sites out there.
These all look like advertising and marketing hiding as online dating. Many people quit smoking or drinking when they start dating someone who does not and its certainly in many companies best interest to get like vices together.
In my opinion avoid them all.
Robert Hooker
Pay vs Free
qagtuirErick Shipmon makes the case for a pay service
Google adsense has given an economic incentive to create free online dating sites. With MySQL and PHP along with all the Open Source stuff out there it is not actually very hard to create a simple social network, and online dating sites are rather simple social networks.
You need is a profile. A picture uploader. A database for storing contacts and email notification. I think it would take 3 coders working with .NET may 4 months to develop a dating site with all the features of the best present ones, and a total hardware software cost of may $10,000. That is two people with some time on their can probably get something from download share ware on a Tomcat machine with PHP and MySQL in a couple of months for hundreds of dollars.
Don't mind if you don't understand the technology, the point is online dating sites are pretty simple, adsense means they can be profitable without charging and their are a lot of advertisers who want to get at the online dating community.
So why pay?
This article clearly is trying to convince one to pay, and it makes two points, one valid and one not.
Shipmon makes the point that online dating sites are somehow better policed. The point that people who pay are going to behave themselves better makes some sense, but the idea that paid sites will provide better filters and service simply does not hold up. Free sites need to have traffic to get adsense revenue and have as much reason to place word filter on them. And frankly 3 nerds with PHP are probably in a far better position to design such software than a company that has purchased the system from a start up.
In short, though lots of free sites are probably small time projects over time big free sites will have as much reason to police their sites and impose policies.
Shipmon's other point is that payment is a block to membership. Oddly now it is having less members rather than more. Considering that more single people are young in lower earner income you can see this as simply saying that the pay sites will be full of older people who can afford the subscriptions while college students probably wont.
In our opinion right now its probably only a matter of time until online dating is free. Young people are figuring how to use online communities which are free, like facebook, bibo, and MySpace as online dating sites anyways and dating is best done in a larger social contact of interaction, so specialists online dating sites probably have a short life span and will have to be folded in to larger online communities that provide services for free.
People in their teens and twenties simply are not going to pay these rates when they know other ways to fin people online.
If the pay for services hope to survive at all they will need to provide much higher levels of service that help people discover potential partners. The present model of form matching is not enough. Online dating sites should make it fun to interact with people who one might date with, make winks and flirts far more interesting. Allow people to interact on line more like Second Life with games and other interactions.
Also more intelligent matching along the lines of chemistry make sense.
In the big picture, perhaps sites run for free by groups of volunteers have one major advantage: they have no motivation to stop you from getting married. Face the facts, the online dating services lose a customer when someone gets married. They want you using their service for years, maybe a life time, since a married person will, for some time, stop their subscription.
A free service without add run by volunteers along the line of Wikipedia could be motivated in helping people find love, not make profits.
So how does Pay vs. Free stand up: in our opinion you can trust pay more than free right now for the obvious reasons presented in the article, but you should not ignore free, especially if you are younger.
Robert Hooker
Google adsense has given an economic incentive to create free online dating sites. With MySQL and PHP along with all the Open Source stuff out there it is not actually very hard to create a simple social network, and online dating sites are rather simple social networks.
You need is a profile. A picture uploader. A database for storing contacts and email notification. I think it would take 3 coders working with .NET may 4 months to develop a dating site with all the features of the best present ones, and a total hardware software cost of may $10,000. That is two people with some time on their can probably get something from download share ware on a Tomcat machine with PHP and MySQL in a couple of months for hundreds of dollars.
Don't mind if you don't understand the technology, the point is online dating sites are pretty simple, adsense means they can be profitable without charging and their are a lot of advertisers who want to get at the online dating community.
So why pay?
This article clearly is trying to convince one to pay, and it makes two points, one valid and one not.
Shipmon makes the point that online dating sites are somehow better policed. The point that people who pay are going to behave themselves better makes some sense, but the idea that paid sites will provide better filters and service simply does not hold up. Free sites need to have traffic to get adsense revenue and have as much reason to place word filter on them. And frankly 3 nerds with PHP are probably in a far better position to design such software than a company that has purchased the system from a start up.
In short, though lots of free sites are probably small time projects over time big free sites will have as much reason to police their sites and impose policies.
Shipmon's other point is that payment is a block to membership. Oddly now it is having less members rather than more. Considering that more single people are young in lower earner income you can see this as simply saying that the pay sites will be full of older people who can afford the subscriptions while college students probably wont.
In our opinion right now its probably only a matter of time until online dating is free. Young people are figuring how to use online communities which are free, like facebook, bibo, and MySpace as online dating sites anyways and dating is best done in a larger social contact of interaction, so specialists online dating sites probably have a short life span and will have to be folded in to larger online communities that provide services for free.
People in their teens and twenties simply are not going to pay these rates when they know other ways to fin people online.
If the pay for services hope to survive at all they will need to provide much higher levels of service that help people discover potential partners. The present model of form matching is not enough. Online dating sites should make it fun to interact with people who one might date with, make winks and flirts far more interesting. Allow people to interact on line more like Second Life with games and other interactions.
Also more intelligent matching along the lines of chemistry make sense.
In the big picture, perhaps sites run for free by groups of volunteers have one major advantage: they have no motivation to stop you from getting married. Face the facts, the online dating services lose a customer when someone gets married. They want you using their service for years, maybe a life time, since a married person will, for some time, stop their subscription.
A free service without add run by volunteers along the line of Wikipedia could be motivated in helping people find love, not make profits.
So how does Pay vs. Free stand up: in our opinion you can trust pay more than free right now for the obvious reasons presented in the article, but you should not ignore free, especially if you are younger.
Robert Hooker
1 in 4 say little white lies okay in online dating
Silicon Valley: Singles surfing the internet for relationships may need to be a little wary with a new poll showing that a quarter of them believe it is acceptable to tell a little white lie while dating online.
source
We have always been strong in our belief that to make online dating work, that is to make it provide happiness to the humans who look for love on it, that it has to accept open mindedness, honesty, respect, and fun.
Sadly the acceptance of little white lies shows how far from this the industry is moving. Pushed by the new d0t coms the businesses are only concerned about volume, and lots of failed relationships is more money than not a lot.
But the consumers seem to have adopted a rather sad perspective. In the old days, when you meet a human being first and then a date grew out of a human relationship, the natural moral rules that have evolved to govern human to human contact aided in opening many of our minds. Perhaps if asked we would say we didn't want to fall in love with some poor, or Jewish, or fat, or short, or without money; but then we would meet someone who was against everything we imagined we wanted only to find they were everything we ever wanted.
My wife is certainly not the person I imagined I would marry just 6 months before.
But on online dating it is pathetic has materialists and inflexible people become. Frankly the number of women who say essentially "no thin haired men need apply" is disturbing.
People new to the service imagine the vast quantity of members provides them the ability to be selective. But I would point out that today we have much greater options to buy things in stores than our grandparents, but our grandparents had many things much better than us, like furniture. Volume does not equal quality.
The acceptance of little white lies is understandable in a dating seen where most players will not even have coffee with someone because they are bald or fat or have a grown child or any other set of check lists people create for dating.
Truthfulness may be the ideal, but many online daters seem to feel it is both necessary and acceptable to express little white lies," said Joelle Kaufman, Vice President of The Experience at Engage.com.And there is the problem, people feel they need to lie about income, height, weight and relationship goal because too many users reduce online dating to a search engine composed of and statements. Because they can find respondents who are the right income, the right size, the right height, the right desire they will only look at them; even when most likely the person is the wrong person.
A little heads up to people out there, we don't understand why we fall in love. That is why we have psychologists. That is why people fall in abusive relationships. That is why soon a majority will live outside of relationships, because we don't understand what makes love.
Online dating needs to evolve beyond forms based input on logical search to help aid the user in the discovery of people, not the search of perfect matches. Even the names "match" present everything wrong. People need to find others who fulfil them in a way they didn't understand. You can't map out the right other and just have them made as a robot. True love is finding someone who shows you the you you didn't know you were before you meet them.
Little white lies, forms based search and indexing, and purely text and graphic web sites will only become sites for easy sex or endless neurotic relationships. That is why we are very interested in efforts to expand the collaboration between people. Second Life and MySpace, web2.0 system that build social networks have more promise than the current dating sites, which are based on library search theory and not a sound understanding of how people find each other.
Robert Hooker
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Online Dating Getting Very Big
Piece on the New Big Business of Online Dating from the IT Perspective
| Online dating firm finds itself attracted to storage area network |  Vintacom's properties include "Meet for Coffee" |  |
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| Vintacom consolidates four systems to one cluster to boost performance |
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