COMPUTERWORLD -- Feb 13 -- We peek under the covers at online dating sites. To succeed, a site needs to do the following:
- Offer excellent response times. Try to give users at least some matches as soon as they've created an account.
Online personals services are glorified search engines. eHarmony, PerfectMatch and Chemistry.com ask a few dozen to several hundred questions and assemble a personality profile and a list of matches. Plentyoffish.com's keeps it simple and uses a short questionnaire. CEO Markus Frind says he doesn't promote it and he's disdainful of the complex matching algorithms offered by competitors.
2. Convert at least 10% of visitors who register into paying customers -- preferably more.
eHarmony pulls information from its Oracle database into high-performance Netezza data warehouse appliances that slice and dice users into behavioral and demographic "buckets." "Because we know more about them, we can target them much better," says Joseph Essas, VP of Technology.
3. Deliver an acceptable range of probable matches and offer a variety of ways to pursue those prospects.
Video chat is perhaps the most controversial communication method offered, if only because video sessions often take a "sexual tilt," especially with men, and that drives away the women, says Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch. The most innovative communication method is virtual dates in a 3-D world. OmniDate, offers an avatar-based virtual dating system.
4. Weeding out cheats, scammers and married guys.
"10% of sign-ups a day are people trying to scam someone -- or rude, obnoxious people, or spammers," Frind says. He removes ~2,000 suspicious users from the system daily. eHarmony has contracted with Iovation, which offers ReputationManager, a service that gathers information on individuals' illicit activity from online dating and other sites and makes it available to subscribers.
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