Welcome
Posted by: Keith on: September 17, 2008
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This blog includes critiques of online dating services and shameless promotes my online dating site project.
Comments are open on every post so come contribute to the conversation.
Chemistry.com… Or, How Not To Build A Dating Site
Posted by: Keith on: September 26, 2008
Chemistry.com is owned by Match.com so I always wondered what the difference is between the sites. I recently signed up to find out. It turns out that Chemistry.com takes the eHarmony approach with questions heavily geared towards personality… but weirder. Have you ever had to take a sensory perception test to join a dating site? (Let alone, ever?)
There are a total 113 questions to answer when joining Chemistry.com (84 analytical questions, 29 profile and criteria questions). There were standard questions like ethnicity, body type, headline, essay (mostly in the basic profile/criteria sections), and there were some oddball questions, but during the sign up process there are a number of oddball questions which I see as being either irrelevant or only important if you think dating is about finding your long lost twin.
Here are the strangest questions, starting with the first one which just may be the weirdest:
Question 1 asks you about the size of your index finger. (There’s probably some pseudo-psychological reason behind this test and I’m sure it’s as accurate as palm reading.)
Question 2 asks you if you’re the oldest, youngest, middle, or only child in your family. (Relevant?)
Question 3 asks for the type of relationship you’re looking for, and it awkwardly includes options for single income and double income marriages. (Relevant? Appropriate?)
Question 5 asks you to categorize your friends as “Social crowd”, “Intellectuals”, “Adventurers”, “Activists”. I found that very limiting. (Could that be on purpose?)
Question 7 is a sensory perception test! (WTF?)
Question 33 asks you to decide between 4 photos which people have a phony smile. (Do you get this one?)
Question 48 asks you to describe how you doodle.
Question 52 asks you to pick a title for the cover of a ficticious book that they display.
Question 83 is another sensory perception test!
Question 84 asks a “Visual Interpretation” question…? I can’t explain it so here’s the graphic.
Question 24 asks you to move dual sliders to indicate your level of fitness and the level you desire in your partner. I know, that makes no sense, so check out the graphic.
Question 25 asks for your ethnicity but “East Indian” is noticeably missing.
I think this is a poorly thought out approach to online dating. I’d rate it as probably the dumbest, and worst, site I’ve tried out. Was it successful for me? No, my top matches were not all that interesting or even seemed to truly match the type that I have in mind. Have you used Chemistry.com? What is your impression?
Is HotOrNot.com’s Dating Site On The Right Track?
Posted by: Keith on: September 26, 2008
HotOrNot.com began as a site for rating the attractiveness of random strangers’ pictures. But recently they’ve introduced a new Meet People service which offers some new possible directions for online dating.
In short, the service works like this: You can browse people by gender, location, age, and keyword. Each profile has photos, a short intro (250 characters or less), a list of keywords to describe themselves and their interests, and a HotList (which is really just another keyword list accompanied by images). The top of each profile includes a simple question: “Do you want to meet him/her?” If you click Yes, the other person gets notified that they have a new “half match”. If they visit your profile and do the same, you two are now “double matches”. You can’t send a message to someone until you are double-matched with them.
I see advantages and disadvantages to this approach but overall I was intrigued by the unique features they offer:
- Allowing messages from only people you like: I think women will especially like this because they can avoid getting messages from creeps and weird strangers. On the other hand, it prevents someone from trying to impress someone they like via a personal message, forcing them to rely on each other’s profile to determine how worthy they are.
- Replacing detailed profile information with keywords: This makes the profile much easier to fill out and less rigid than what you’d normally find on a dating site. On the other hand, having predefined questions can help focus the users to enter the most applicable information. Also, HotOrNot unfortunately does not help the user avoid misspellings or uncommon variations.
- “Flowing” search results: I’ve always thought that the traditional list of search results that dating sites offer cheapen the idea of dating. When you meet someone in real life you aren’t picking them from a list. It gives less focus on individuals than you have in real life comings and goings. HotOrNot uses the same flow of search results they use for their standard rating service — presenting one profile at a time with previews for the next 4 upcoming results.
Whether or not these are useful features is debatable, and I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments, but there is one disadvantage to using their site: there seem to be technical issues with their half-matching feature. During the time I had an active profile on their site I received around a dozen email notifications stating I had new half matches, but after logging in I was told I had none. I sent a few messages to their tech support asking, what happened? Is there a bug with their site preventing them from being displayed? Or were the emails incorrectly sent to me? Unfortunately I NEVER heard a response. I know…how rude! So whether it’s a technical problem or a miscommunication of how the feature works, it’s obvious they need to do some more work. And they could start by being more responsive to their users.
Spy Features Of Dating Sites
Posted by: Keith on: September 21, 2008
It is common for dating sites to offer features that let you spy a little on the activity of another user, like seeing who viewed your profile or read a message you sent. I call these spy features. Here’s a full list of the ones I’ve encountered:
- “Who Viewed Me”: Usually sites will let you do this only if you opt to be seen as well. We’re all curious as to who is checking us out but is it worth it? Not everyone who reads your profile may be interested, and not every interested person will leave your profile and still be interested. It may also inhibit people from looking at profiles because they’ll be noticed.
- See if sent message was read: This feature exists really just to see when a message was read. So what is its purpose besides helping you be a stalker? Sometimes I read a message but don’t have time to respond. The other person could make a wrong assumption if they decided to check up on me.
- See who “favorited” you: Some sites let you add people to a Favorites list, but on Match.com you can find out if you’re on someone else’s list. I like the idea of having this list but it should definitely be private!
Are there any more? Is there any value to these kinds of features? Have they helped you before to get a date?
Ever Experienced “Online Dating Burnout”?
Posted by: Keith on: September 20, 2008
You sign up for a new online dating service. Within the first week you receive a few winks, messages from several people, and over a dozen profile views. But for the remainder of your subscription, activity sharply drops. You get a few dozen more profile views, maybe a wink and messages from a few more people.
I call it “online dating burnout”. Shortly after signing up for a new service you hit a wall — you’ve already checked out the few people you liked so now all you can do is wait for more to sign up. I’ve had several friends complain about this and I’ve experienced it as well.
Have you experienced online dating burnout? If not, how do you think you were able to avoid it?
Match.com’s Matching Misses The Mark
Posted by: Keith on: September 19, 2008
“More ways to search. And to find.” That’s stated near the top of the Search page on Match.com (one of many really ugly pages on their site). That sums up their approach to connecting people — by providing many different options to filter your search. Are more options good? That depends…are they necessary? I found some of these to be useless and sometimes poorly conceived.:
- Mutual Matches: This search shows people with similar traits and interests as you, with no regard to what your criteria are except age and location. I found that most (and all on the first page) were not compatible with me because of personality, race, height, or body type.
- Reverse Matches: This search shows you the people for whom you rank high in their search results. It sounds like an interesting idea but in practice I ran into the same problems as the Mutual Match because my criteria is not a factor.
- Quick (age/location) Search: I found this too simple to be effective. Not only was I still finding many women incompatible with my criteria but in many cases I was completely incompatible with them!
- Custom Searches: I found these to be the most useful searches because I could state my criteria for a match. However it appears that Match.com treats at least some of this criteria as suggested criteria — some of the women in my results didn’t meet my basic race and body type criteria.
- Search By Username: I guess this might be useful…1% of the time.
- Search By Keyword and Search By matchWord: These are 2 different searches but I’ll tackle them together because by any basic tenet of design and common sense they should be combined. “Search By Keyword” searches for a word or phrase in the text fields of other people’s profiles, so it could be useful for traits or interests not covered by the other fields. You can also enter “matchWords” which are basically keywords or tags that you can list on your profile to, again, cover traits or interests not already covered. So you can see why these 2 searches would make better sense when combined. Also the only other filters available are age and location so it wasn’t very useful.
To summarize, the main problems I found with these searches are:
- Neglect of my required criteria: I believe most people have a few basic requirements besides age and location (for example: race, parent vs. non-parent, height). Match.com either ignores this concept or treats it as a low priority.
- Too many search types: Many of these search types could have been combined into 1. But given Match.com’s piss-poor job with the design of their interface and the workflow within their site, they probably would have only made it more complicated.
- Unnecessary search types: I admit that looking up people for whom you match (even if they don’t match you) is interesting but not useful enough to be one of the premier features.
Do you use Match.com? Share your success and failures in the comments. What features do you like or not like?
Online Dating Is Going To Change
Posted by: Keith on: September 18, 2008
Dating should not require hours of form filling.
Dating is not a search for someone who is exactly like you.
Dating should not be about selling yourself with a “profile” and a catchy headline.
Dating is not about complex search queries, personality tests, reverse matching, view counts, virtual winks, photo albums, etc.
So it’s time to turn the tide.
To its credit, online dating sites have had some advantages over real world meetings. They are places where you know you’ll find singles. It’s easier to find someone who may be your “type”. It’s easier to try to meet people on your couch while watching TV in your pajamas than getting dolled up for the hot club downtown brimming with skanks and douchebags and $10 drinks. And for some it’s easier on the pride to get rejected online than in person.
Does that make online dating better? I don’t think so. It still lacks something: excitement! By pegging you into a “profile” and finding “matches” based on “criteria”, online dating has been totally geekafied. It’s cold and impersonal. It’s based on algorithms, logic, science… that’s not what love and emotion are rooted in. A shared glance may be enough to get someone’s heart pounding. Meeting someone in person, a spark may ignite. Hear someone’s voice or smell their perfume and they may run through your mind for the rest of the day. So how can we expect a bio and a photo on a web page to do the same? It’s no wonder that so many people sign up for a dating service as a last resort.
Can online dating be better? Yes, definitely! We just need to be innovative. The real world experience will never be exactly reproduced in a virtual environment but we can get close, and we can invent revolutionary new ways of connecting people to make online dating the primary choice of most people, and without the negative connotations that it brings to some minds.
I don’t use the word “revolutionary” lightly. We really could be on the cusp of not just a sea change in online dating but a radical new way for people to meet and start relationships. We are in the middle of a social revolution on the internet. However online dating has yet to enlist in its ranks. (No, I do not consider simply having a profile and messaging options as a sign of a social network.) The social web is still young so there is much yet to learn about its best practices and applications. Where it goes next, I believe, can only benefit online dating.
That’s where the “Hearts” project comes in. “Hearts” is the code-name for the online dating network that I’m building. I plan for Hearts to have the features that will overcome the frustrations and pitfalls that other dating networks currently have. I’m building on top of the standard profile search concept (which despite my cynicism still holds some value) and introduce new ways to connect people who will like each other, not just people who have the same interests or personality. I’d like to make the online experience more social and exciting.
As this blog grows I’ll detail those thoughts more, but more importantly I’m looking for your feedback. Comments are open on every post so feel free to chime in, whether you have a great idea or you just want to sound off. Online dating is going to change so come be a part of the revolution!
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