Industry

What is an online dating aggregator? It is a website that pulls profiles from multiple dating sites based on a search inputted by a user on the aggregator site. James Nord of Rubixx says it is similar to how a travel website like CheapFlights.com works by searching a number of airlines for the best flight. While in theory it sounds like a good idea, practically it has a way to go. One of the main problems is the lack of search criteria. Rubixx allows on their website to input your gender, the gender you are looking for, a age range and a US zip code. This really is not enough information to search on, especially based on the number of profiles that it shows you. You basically end up just looking at pictures. No additional information is present in the simplified profiles Rubixx displays to you in the search results, with the exception of what dating site the profile is found on. Once you find a profile you like, you click on the picture and you are redirected to the dating site where you can look at more details of the profile. Most of the dating sites require you to sign up with a free account before you can view more details. Currently Rubixx gathers profiles from the following dating sites, Match.com, Date.com, Matchmaker.com, AmericanSingles.com Cupid.com, uDate.com, Friendfinder.com and MillionaireMatch.com.

Another similar web portal to Rubixx is Copenda. Copenda calls themselves a Social People Search and Dating engine. With Copenda you can search the social networks hi5, MySpace, Friendster and the dating sites Match.com and PlentyofFish.com. The big news at Copenda is they will be adding Facebook to the search soon in June, 2009. Currently there are more than 200 million users on Facebook. Copenda has more features than Rubixx and in its own way, acts like a dating site. The reason I say this is because you can favorite profiles, add comments to them and even rate them. Comparing multiple profiles is allowed as well as viewing more than one profile photo. Searching at Compenda is more in-depth as well when compared to Rubixx. You can specify keywords, location distance as well as marital status, religion, body type, height range and ethnicity. The only thing missing really is the ability to communicate directly with the person.

For more on the story, read The Washington Post. You can find Rubixx here and Copenda here.

Facebook announced late last month their new Open Stream API to developers. What this means is, Facebook user information now can be shared with other websites and software. Don't worry, users will still have full control on who can see and use their information. Apparently permissions will work similar to how the current Facebook Application system works.

This is good news for dating sites. It means we will probably see in the coming months or year the ability to transfer over information from Facebook when we create a profile on a dating site. Not all dating sites will do this initially but I bet one or two of the popular ones will test it. Dating profile quality is important for a successful dating site and it does suffer when people join multiple dating services. Who wants to type in the same information over and over? When this happens, less information typically is included in the newer profiles by the single as they grow bored entering the same information again. I am sure online daters would much rather store their profile information and update it in one spot. Facebook has enough members (over 200 million global users) to make them a prime candidate to offer this type of service.

For more on this story, read the Facebook Developers Blog and check out the Online Dating Insider for further insight into how Open Stream may help the dating industry.

There have been a few articles lately regarding who owns all the user profile information and communications that people do on social networks and online dating sites. It really came to the forefront in the news when Facebook updated their Terms of Use a few weeks ago that readdressed the ownership issue. Basically Facebook wanted almost complete control of all user generated content.

irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sub-license) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), ...

Many Facebook users complained about these new terms and with all the media attention it was getting, Facebook has rewritten their Terms Of Use and has posted a draft copy. They are even allowing users to comment and vote on the new proposed Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities For Users. This is a surprising move that should make many Facebook users happy.

In the online dating world, dating sites have Terms of Service that can vary wildly. Some are similar to Facebook's old terms and some to the new terms of use. The one thing with dating sites you may wonder about is how long do they keep all this information for and what they do with it. With most of the popular dating sites they have strict privacy policies about who may see what information. As far as with how long the information is kept, it is all over the map. Dating sites like eHarmony doesn't delete your information from their database. With eHarmony's 200 plus questionnaire, this is a good thing as if you ever need to return to the site, your information will still be available to you when you reactivate your account. The flip side of this for example, is Plenty Of Fish. If your account is inactive for 6 months to a year then your account will be deleted. Not a big deal if you are a returning user as it only takes less than 5 minutes to fill out any required information for the profile.

For more information on the Facebook new terms of use, read PC World. To better understand the life of your online dating profile on many of the popular dating sites, read ComputerWorld.

eHarmony won Silver in the Customer Service category for the 2008 Gartner and 1to1 Customer Awards. Gold went to Overstock.com with Bronze being received by Cricket Communications. You ask, who is 1to1? Quoted from their website:

1to1.com is a personalized Web site developed by Peppers & Rogers Group to help people interested in CRM and one-to-one marketing find information and resources to create more loyal, profitable relationships with their customers by treating different customers differently. The site is built around the four-step IDIC methodology of Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. - identify your customers, differentiate them based on value and need, interact to learn more about what they need and then customize your products and services to meet their needs.

eHarmony is a client of 1to1 Media and it is nice to know they are taking an interest in customer service to help not only the company's bottom line but to improve the overall experience of members at eHarmony. Too often dating sites rely just on FAQs and Help sections built into the website. Paying customers need more than this. Emails and calls to customer support need to be tailored to the member. Dating Sites should be exceptionally good at this since they already have a lot of personal information about the member and hopefully they keep track of the members usage pattern of the dating service as well. Simply substituting a members name in a stock email doesn't work anymore, people are smarter than this.

See the complete winners and category list Winners here.

For more information on eHarmony, read our review.

Do you want to see how many visitors a dating site has been getting over time? Google Trends now offers this ability. You can also compare up to 5 different sites. To see the daily unique visitor numbers (instead of just a graph) you must be logged into Trends.

The Google Trends website data is "estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources" (quoted from the Google Webmaster Blog. I would assume these sources are the searches people perform on Google (which they track) and from their other free services like Google Analytics. These results are probably more accurate than other companies with similar services like Alexa or Compete since, Google has such a large pool of data to collect estimates from. Google is responsible for providing over 60% (see USA Today) of the search results from search engines, for people in the United States.

In Japan, 8 popular matchmaker services created a industry association that will introduce later this year a system which will certify the quality of service of matchmakers. Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will be helping to create this certification system. Some of the points that this certification will address are:

... clear-cut explanations of contract documents, cancellation policies and an obligation by the service providers to obtain public documents certifying that applicants are single.

Some estimates conclude there are almost 3,700 matchmaking companies in Japan with about 600,000 customers. These include both offline and online services.

This new Matchmaking Industry Association is in response to a huge rise in complaints over the last few years in Japan. In 2007 there was 2,871 complaints up 80% since 2000.

When reading the article the one guideline that the association wants to tackle that I was surprised about was "certifying that applicants are single". I'm not sure how possible this is. They can check for marriage licenses but, what can they really do beyond that?