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A few months ago I received several emails from people asking me to take down their profiles. It took me a while to figure out that these were people who found their names on JLove and that they weren’t having any luck getting JLove to take down their profiles.
It turns out that JLove was combing net for high-profile jewish names. They would create profiles based on these names, Google would index the site and when certain popular names were searched for, the JLove profile would show up. This upset quite a few people, as you can imagine.

JLove was started by several ex JDate staff. The idea was to create a new site which would cater to Jewish people not on JDate with new features and functionality, and possible lure people away from JDate. Fast forward a year later and you can see the bump in traffic that JLove experienced due to the fake profiles, and how the traffic dropped off again.

Textbook example of how deceiving your customers can come back and bite you. It’s too bad about JLove but thats the online dating industry for you. For every new scheme that successfully drives more traffic, there are countless others that fail because someone, somewhere, didn’t think through the repercussions of their actions.

I had a great conversation with Mandy Ginsberg, the new North America General Manager of Match.com. Mandy was the GM of Chemistry.com previously. Mandy replaced Craig Wax, who is no longer with the company. Here’s what I learned.

Chemistry growth is up 11%. They have a high rate of people completing the initial profiles. A series of new questions are displayed when I logged in this week (been a while), six in all. I am in the middle of going through the multi-step meeting process. This is not a product review, but I continue to keep track of what’s working and where improvements are needed.

Helen Fisher, who created the Chemistry matching system, has written a book about why we match up with people. The book is based on what she has learned from members of Chemistry.com during the last 2.5 years. Everyone there is excited about the book and I am hoping for an unprecedented look into how singles are using online dating.

Chemistry is launching a new ad campaign in April 2009. The campaign will feature hard-hitting, irreverent and urban messaging. Photo to the left is of successful couples who have met on Chemistry. This is a small sampling, there simply isn’t enough room for them to display them all.

Chemistry is working hard to streamline the communication process. I was glad to hear that. It takes a while to get to the point where you’re actually asking someone out on a date.

Now, on to Match. Match is preparing a new ad campaign in coming weeks. More on this after I’ve had a chance to review the creative.

Match is testing a newsfeed feature similar to the Facebook Live Feed. Only certain members can see the feature at this point.

Working on 2009 strategy now. Stepping back to figure out what consumers are feeling, address quality of matches and responses and laying out roadmap to address those sentiments. We’re going to see more innovation from Match in 2009 than we’ve seen in the past few years. Maybe video, we’ll see.

There is a whole new position for someone who is in charge of retention efforts.

Match gets 25,000 new members a day, that is incredible. I talk to a lot of smaller dating sites who would kill to have 25k members.

I’ve mentioned that the Facebook Application “Are You Interested” displays profiles of members who are also on Match. Turns out that Match shares a feed of members with Are You Interested, which inserts the profiles into the profile stream every once in a while. Clicking “Yes” on one of these profiles directs the user over to Match.com, where I found that I had to log in twice to see the person’s profile.

Login problems aside, this is a good way for Match to try out social network marketing without a) changing the way Match works for existing members and b) implementation appears fairly straightforward, click Yes (Anonymous) or Yes(Let Them Know) and either way you are redirected to Match.com, where hopefully you will create an account in order to communicate with the person. I’m not sure if there is a difference between the two Yes options?

Watch for Match to do more in the social networking space as they continue to evaluate new opportunities and partners.

WeddingBee, a wedding blog with 180,000 monthly readers, has been acquired by eHarmony. There are so many of these blogs I can’t keep track, turns out eHarmony thought enough of this one to make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

eHarmony is doing a good job of extending the brand into the wedding market, WeddingBee is one of several recent acquisitions into the wedding space.

Several contributors were upset that WeddingBee, who’s founder was against eHarmony not being GLBT-friendly, have quit. Not surprising.

Now that the eHarmony PR team appears to be copy-editing comments on the WeddingBee blog, we’ll see how the editorial tone and content changes over time. Bloggers with new corporate parents go through a cycle, of being elated at the money, taking some much-needed time off, then the realization that they are not as free as they used to be, because a company will say whatever it takes to get a deal done, the bloggers freedom is the last thing they consider when in acquisition talks. Or maybe this deal will be an anomaly and everything will go swimmingly.

Amazing traffic growth at WeddingBee in the past year. Nice job with that. They have more readers than many dating sites have members. Another case of decent editorial and topical content, even though the tone of most wedding blogs annoys me, it must be the overly saccharine happy people, so effusive in their joy and elation (sigh).

The site is overrun with Google ads, hopefully someone with advertising experience at eHarmony will reign in overabundance of mis-targeted ads.

I wonder how they are paying other editors- pay-per-post, performance-based payouts, ads revenue share or some other payment schedule?

Full story at WeddingBee and the comments and unfiltered backstory at the unofficial eHarmony blog.

Talked to iovation about fraud detection in the online dating space. Their shared database of fraudulent activity is gigantic and getting larger every day.

Had a great call with new GM of North American Mandy Ginsberg at Match today. Posting details in the next day or two.

I have an interview with Bonefish to post, as well as the notes from my conversation with Boonex.

IMVU co-founder Eric Ries has a new blog, Startup Lessons Learned.

If you’re investigating integrating virtual gifts, read this post.

This is old news but still interesting: Lovelorn staff at a Japanese marketing company can take paid time off after an upsetting break-up with a partner, with more “heartache leave” offered as they get older.

I’ve been thinking about what the new breed of dating sites should look like, and why I don’t have an RSS feed for my dating communications and activity.

40th birthday countdown, T-19 days.

Chris Nguyen at Cupid.com wrote in to announce the launch of a safety feature called FollowMeCupid.com. FollowMeCupid is one of those services where you enter your date details and a contact into the website. If you don’t check in on time your contact is, well, contacted.

FollowMeCupid is useful because you don’t have to explicitly tell your friends you are going out on a date, they only get the message if you fail to check in.

To try it out, I set up an event this morning, which is simple. I set the date, time, primary and a secondary contacts, for my “date.” The contacts were myself in both instances. As expected, I received text messages to my phone and email at the appointed times.

The only part that confused me are the checkboxes next to my contacts. What are they for? I checked one box and not the other and still got emails and SMS’s to both my contacts.

The emails are not formatted well, contain grammar errors and for some reason don’t contain information on how to contact the person that may be in trouble. Talk about useless. I said my name is Dave. What if my contact know’s more than one Dave? Do they call all of them? Did anyone test this on real people before announcing it? I think not.

I would never trust my physical well-being to a website run by a dating site without knowing a lot more about how it works. What’s the uptime on the site? Are there redundancy and backup servers spread across the country? Is the site connected to the internet and cell phone networks in fail-safe manner? What happens when the system crashes and is unable to send an SOS to your contact?

My overall reaction to FollowMeCupid is there are sites that already offer similar functionality, not sure why we need another one. The website looks good but obviously not enough thought was put into how people would actually use it. The ability to use the service on other dating sites as a link or API would be great. Perhaps version 2 will fix some of the problems and make it more useful.

New Online Dating Payment Services

How PlentyOfFish Made a Million in Three Months

Weekly Digest of the Social Networking Space: Sept 24, 2008

I am glad to announce that I am not listed as on online predator.
I’m glad to see that Astralmatch has a Review of Yahoo Personals Relationship Profile Assessments.
Eyealike mentioned in article about image recognition. Allows users of dating sites to narrow their list of candidates based on physical appearance. No Web sites have signed up yet. I have been a proponent of this for years, hopefully a site will step up to the plate and let members give it a try.

eharmony blog on A Month of Matches

Dateology has Lessons from eHarmony for guys: #1- Stand Out

The population of U.S. singles 15 and older grew to 119.9 million in 2007 - Washington Post.

Online Dating Industry Moves and News

I was looking around for some dating industry contacts on LinkedIn and saw that Katie Burke Mitic left Yahoo! Personals as GM and doesn’t even list the position on her LinkedIn profile.

Five Ways to Pick Up a Girl with Your iPhone

A while back Fernando Ardenghi took issue with my statement “eHarmony is innovating, continuously updating the site and matching algorithm.” Fernando argues that as it updates its matching algorithm, eHarmony should recalculate compatibility between prospectives mates in its entire big database. He seems to be saying that dating sites won’t re-index their databases in order to take advantage of improved matching capabilities.

All of a sudden it hit me. Dating site compatibility assessment systems need to be more like Google.

Think about the Google web index, which is updated every so often to improve search results. When Google publishes a new index, people who are negatively affected in the organic search results tend to get upset. If you’re a company spending thousands of dollars a month in SEO fees to show up on the first page of Google’s search results and all of a sudden you’re on page six, you’re going to understandably freak out.

I like to think of eHarmony as being somewhat like Google, in that they are very secretive about their matching system, it evolves over time, and for a certain number of singles, works well. The main difference is that we know a lot more about Google’s indexing systems than we do eHarmony.

eHarmony is slowly becoming more transparent though a series of blogs and the eHarmony Labs. (although the labs blog hasn’t been updated in a month.) I for one would like to see them talk more about the matching system. How does it work, how has it evolved, what are they learning and how is that knowledge fed back into the matching system? Part of the beauty of eHarmony is that they do most of the work, but still, I’d like to know what my $50 is doing for me each month. I’m all for protecting intellectual property, but part of me thinks increased transparency into the matching process would actually be more helpful.

The marketing people at eHarmony are grinning right now, they know it’s all about ad spend. As long as more people visit and become paying members, the “better” the service becomes. If there are more members, more people will get married, regardless if the matching system improves or not.

And pretty soon, They’ll have to answer to the SEC and then it’s all about preserving shareholder value. That’s when eHarmony jumps the shark. They’re really in a difficult place right now if you think about it. Visitors are basically flat from a year ago and I assume they are spending even more money on marketing.

If they go on this acquisition spree that everyone is talking about, are they going to buy a site for the traffic, the revenue or the cross-sell, like Match promoting Chemistry (but not the other way around?)

What happens if/when eHarmony tweaks their matching system? Do people that are potential matches get disconnected? Is there a feedback loop in place where someone says, “whoa, we just lost 134,000 matches based on that last algorithm change.” Are the matches at eHarmony improving over time, staying the same, or getting worse? How can we measure improvement? I don’t want to rely on an increase in marriages per day, it’s not nuanced enough to use as a realistic measurement.

Dr. Houran and others talk a lot about the science of matching, but it really comes down to math when you’re talking about matching millions of members. What is that threshold for “connect them they are a great match” and being right on the line between a match and not? My online dating neurosis occurs when I think about the women that I’m not connecting with because my dating services are not putting them in front of me for some reason or another. Shudder. This is the stuff that drives me crazy, the potential for missed matches. My personal example on Match is when I say I want kids, and I see a million women, but if I say I’m not sure about kids, the dating pool dries up considerably. How many of those women that say they want two kids are just saying that and would be fine without kids? I meet a TON of women in that situation.

I would love to hear from someone at eHarmony who is allowed enough leeway to talk about how they run these amazingly complex matching systems, fascinating stuff.

Yesterday I was badgering a friend to put up a testimonial for me on Match.com. I have one already, and without fail woman mention it when they email me. I mean email be back, of course. Surely you didn’t think that woman actually initiate conversation on dating sites. Silly newbie, you’ll learn soon enough. If you’re not one of the 10% of alpha mails sending out lots of emails on your dating site, you’re pretty much guaranteed failure.

Since testimonials started on Match, I have seen only one on profiles I’ve browsed, whereas I’ve collected and written scores on LinkedIn. Getting a close friend to write something positive about you is difficult to say the least.

Negative comments are easier to find, there are scores of websites where you can read reviews of people. The problem is that it’s too easy to change usernames or join new sites for these sites to be truly useful.

Yesterday I got an email from WebNotes, a Firefox plugin the enables you to annotate web pages with stickies and highlight text. Annotating web pages is a concept that has been around a long time. Several companies have come and gone trying to make it easier for people to collectively ad perspective, value and insight into existing content. I’ve always hoped that the practice would take off, and now we have several new companies trying to make a go of it. After all, user-generated commentary increases time spent on site, creates community and can be ad-supported.

What if we all started annotating online dating profiles?

There will always be trolls and people out to ruin the party, but with a solid reputation management system in place, comments might be a good way to learn more about people than generic dating profiles. If you don’t want to see the comments, you can turn them off, simple. I shudder to think what people would say about me, “asked to split the bill, total bore, didn’t compliment me enough,” but I think in the future the social aspects of feedback and reputation are going to be tightly integrated with our online representations.

If you install WebNotes, you’ll see that pages like this (fixed link) display highlighted text and sticky notes.

Dr. James Houran has accepted Dr. Joel Block’s challenge. With several caveats.

Update: Dr. Block responds to Dr. Houran in the comments for Personality Testing Smackdown. Wow, just go read it and come back.

Dr. Houran says:

…my team is confident we can build an original customized application that’s shorter and more entertaining test than your questionnaire.

However, we don’t work for free. The estimated cost to combine all of the features described above in a new application, to meet APA testing standards, and being ready within approximately six months will cost approximately USD $350,000.00…. We will require full payment before the project will begin. We can also accept a wire transfer.

I’m sorry, did I miss something? Dr. Houran is taking the shootout and trying to turn a profit. He’s completely ignoring the original shootout idea- put your best test up against each other and see which one is more effective (among other factors.)

Nobody said anything about the length and amusement factor of tests. We’re talking about finding out which matching system is most effective.

It gets better. Dr. Houran is on a role here:

Your dismissive, cavalier attitude about science is neither consistent with the messaging you have on your site nor with your clinical education and credentials. As an academic, I find it appalling and bordering on unethical. I’m even tempted to contact all professional organization to which you belong and notify them of the situation.

So Dr. Houran wants to charge a competitor $350,000 for a personality test and also report him to the authorities? Now I’m really lost. Someone wrote me

Dr. Houran says that his team has developed several proprietary matching systems on some of the biggest dating sites. I wish he would talk about this more. What sites? Why not share the results from these sites? Why not use an existing site for the shootout?

There really is no need for things to get this complicated. That’s what happens when ego’s and professional reputations are at stake. All the academic-speak, personal attacks and self-important banter is tiring. Dr. Houran has effectively ended the conversation on his own terms.

That’s too bad, because Lynne Sandler has a fantastic idea:

Here is my off-the-cuff idea for a “real-life” challenge: Get a sample size of singles. Each single takes all of our personality tests and receives lists of ranked matches from each of us. Put them in a room for a huge speed-dating-like event. Have them meet and rank their dates on score cards. Let them tell us which system introduced them to people they liked and want to see again. We can have periodic follow-up interviews to measure success.

Brilliant. This is much more doable. Easy to set up, inexpensive and will provide some real-world results. I met Lynn over the summer and we had a great talk. I really like her and her perspective on matching people. I like her even more after hearing her idea for a challenge.

As a last resort, I can always get some volunteers to sign up for dating sites and follow a protocol and report results.

It’s too bad consumers don’t care about matching systems, if they did they would vote with their mouse and their wallet and this conversation would be completely different. Dating sites would be touting their efficiency levels in their marketing campaigns, just like drug companies, and constantly evolving their algorithms to adapt to what they learn along the way. AFAIK eHarmony is the only company that actively tweaks their system.

Turns out the dating industry is just as messy and organic and chaotic as dating itself.

eHarmony Starts an Open Relationship With AOL

EHarmony begins a partnership with AOL today to share its online dating advice to readers of AOL Personals. AOL users will be able to register for eHarmony’s singles matching service directly from AOL Personals, but in keeping with AOL’s new aggregation format, eHarmony will share the screen with competing services like Match.com.

eHarmony certainly is doing a great job syndicating their dating advice through various channels. People at AOL will read about brushing their teeth before a date, then say, wow, eHarmony, thanks for that advice, here’s $100, go find me my mate. Nice traffic driver and there are reams of generic dating advice to be repurposed out there.

eHarmony’s metrics and methodology behind the “236 marriages a day” claim.
10 things eHarmony 2.0 can copy from Gmail.
eHarmony: 1 billion served.

If you want all the facts about eHarmony, you should be reading the Unofficial eHarmony blog. They are relentless in their coverage, best eHarmony resource out there by far.