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
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