I think the matchmaker idea is good. Many people have thought, "Man, I just know that those two of my friends would be great together." And I like the way you let people sign up their friends.
However, I'm not so sure about the dating on Twitter thing. I think people want to do their dating in private. This is why dating applications on Facebook are not doing that great. People have a hard enough time plucking up the courage to ask out the object of their affection. Letting a bunch of other people know about it as well would be way too embarassing.
because many people don't like going on a blind date, its usually a very awkward experience. At least this way both people will know what the other one looks like
There have been several. A few other non-matchmaking dating sites have added matchmaking as a feature, as well. (There is a matchmaker.com dating site, but I'm not actually sure that it does matchmaking, and the site blasts me with an annoying javascript chat-bot as soon as I visit, so I'm not inclined to explore further....)
Fundamentally, the matchmaker idea doesn't solve the chicken-and-egg problem of dating -- you still need to have people on the site with whom to make matches. While you could try to match people with non-users, this is really just a dressed-up form of email invites, which most people have learned to tune out. It seems that in order to really crack the chicken/egg problem of a new dating site, one needs to provide a value that is independent of the dating problem itself.
One of the things that I've noticed when researching this myself is that the majority of the time, people generally dont fill out their profiles too well - which I would suggest lessens their chances of someone finding them.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel regarding dating sites, why not create a webapp that helps people create good custom profiles for themselves to increase their chances at finding someone?
Perhaps have it so that it can export the blocks of information which are customised for the main dating sites - to make it an easier process, and also allow for data portability across multiple dating sites.
That would be one of the ways I'd approach this kind of problem.
I think help with profiles is an excellent idea. Before I was married (met my wife on yahoo personals way back when it was still free), I dated a lot of people I met online and a couple of women showed me the "typical" profile of a guy who approached them and they were <b>terrible</b>. It was easy to see why women were turned off. I'm sure if the guys realized how desperate and needy they came across, they'd be able to do a better job of hooking up.
It was easy to see why women were turned off. I'm sure if the guys realized how desperate and needy they came across, they'd be able to do a better job of hooking up.
I think there is still a stigma attached to online dating that people are scraping the bottom of the barrel- amongst women especially. In fact, while researching dating sites (I was thinking about building a competitive dating site for Australia in 06/07) I've often come across the phrase "I cant believe I'm doing this" as the first sentence in a female's profile.
You can have the best dating technology in the world, but the reality is that there are a significant number of people just dont have profiles that are any good or a real judge of a person's character. I think this problem is compounded when you consider that often people dont have very descriptive profiles when writing something about themselves and often write about tastes that are seemingly universal but non specific. EG, if I wrote I liked movies, as opposed to writing I liked Tarantino and Kubrick films.
Often I seen profiles (of both men and women, so this problem is not gender specific) where people are just trying to meet minimum word counts. Any kind of matching technology based off keyword matching in this kind of situation simply fails.
I think for a technology like this to have any decent chance, there would need to be a couple of core components.
1) Point and click profile writing, where people can click on hobbies and it can attempt to write something for them. You would also have to ensure that profile's dont look like canned responses.
2) Photo touching up - Often when I've touched up photo's in photoshop for others, I find myself using the same techniques, with often very similar settings on the sliders - if there was a way you could automatically detect and touch up photos, then it would be fantastic. I'm not sure if there are any sites out there that currently have this feature, but it would make a great standalone site too, especially with photo sharing sites and social networking sites being popular.
3) Profile exporting. If I've written a profile for say match.com and I want to goto eharmony.com, I dont want have to rewrite significant chunks of it to match the new format, especially given a large number of people have trouble writing even one profile.
I've got it, lets create a virtual experience dating site. That way you never have to meet the person - you can just do things together from a distance ;)
Perhaps a feature like facial merging (a la http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=260642) of the couple to show potential cuteness/ugliness of babies is something to consider.
The crowd then chooses couples, and votes on results, and hence couples are connected/introduced by crowdsourcing.
hotornot + crowdsourcing + topic of common interest to break the ice.
I was throwing a concept around with a friend of mine about 2 years ago where the dating site would learn what type of people you're attracted too when you click on profile pictures (using some kind of facial recognition technology presumably) and then be able to suggest profiles you would be potentially interested in.
The side effect of this would be that shy people could still keep photo's in private galleries, but still get taken into the overall equation and potentially matched up with someone who might find them attractive.
Fortunately (or unfortunately? Depends how you look at it I guess) we had no real interest in starting up a dating site at the end of the day.
I never claimed not to be lazy. :)
And if money were no object (i.e. if I were a student, or didn't have a family), I would at least take a stab at doing it myself.
But, alas: money is an object, my job is demanding and my family comes first. (Although I don't deny that I am partially making excuses for myself).
You know, originally that was where my train of thought was going. Then I did some quick research to see what else was out there, and found this Facebook app called "Date My Friends" that operated on this principle. They've been around for a while and haven't really picked up much traction, which kind of made me move away from this idea. Of course, the devil is in the details, but I always look at the motivating factors for each user role..and I don't really see one for the "matchmaker" role.
The "bounty for a successful match" idea is interesting, though...maybe a payment model where the successfully matched people pay to unlock the mutual contact info, and 90% of that would go to the matchmaker? Hmmmm...
It hinges on whether matchmakers can work their magic only on people they actually know (which limits the number of people they could match up), or if they could do it simply by looking at profiles of people they don't know personally.
Even the most outgoing people I know have less than 1,000 friends on Facebook. How many matches could they possibly mine from that group?
Well if you actually had people with skin in the game, they have an incentive to make it work. This could mean calling people on the phone, going to visit them in person, etc. And in general I bet a really talented matchmaker could get someone to be a lot more candid than they'd otherwise be on a publicly visible profile. It's like a cap-and-trade system; by offering up a pot of gold to the winners you spur massive amounts of innovation. For example, if a matchmaker could increase his success rates by offering up dating tips and personal grooming advice then there would be a system in place promising him a pot of gold for doing it.
It's been done before an there is a UK site that has been running quite successfully for several years called My Single Friend - URL below for reference.
Dating problems are like depression in that the symptoms are familiar-- sentiments like "all the good ones are taken"-- but the causes are varied and numerous. No single cure is going to work for everyone, or even a large subset of the population.
Gender balance is the biggest problem with dating sites. Women get flooded with spam winks/emails and get bored sifting through the haystack of low-quality leads. Men have no way of standing out amid the spam and get very little attention.
My experience with dating sites is from a few years ago and not very extensive, but I disagree that men have no way of standing out. I'd say that a well-formed, a few paragraphs long, somewhat targeted (i.e., making references to the things in the woman's profile) and not openly desperate message gives you a very good chance of getting a reply. It's true women get a lot of attention but it's mostly trash. I think it's best to focus on profiles without photos.
However, I'm not so sure about the dating on Twitter thing. I think people want to do their dating in private. This is why dating applications on Facebook are not doing that great. People have a hard enough time plucking up the courage to ask out the object of their affection. Letting a bunch of other people know about it as well would be way too embarassing.