Internet Dating Much More Successful Than Thought

# 94 per cent of those surveyed saw their ‘e-partner’ again after first meeting them, and the relationships lasted for an average of at least seven months, with 18 per cent of them lasting over a year.

# men online were significantly more likely to be committed to the relationship than women and were more dependent on their ‘e-partner’.

# the more the couple engaged in simultaneous online chat before meeting rather than simply e-mailing one another, the more they were found to depend on one another emotionally and the more they understood one another.

# those who exchanged gifts before meeting had a more committed and deeper relationship.

# the more the couple talked on the telephone before they met, the deeper the relationship.

The other night we were busy coding away at our local Internet watering hole, listening to music via iTunes to drown out the dribble from the main speakers. Naturally, someone noticed that there was a shared Library available and pointed it out to us all.

Like a bunch of Peeking Toms, we sat there browsing the collection and sending ourselves funny IM tarts to help pass the time and work off the beer. It felt so dirty, but we endured. Eventually, we were listening to music off this person’s ‘puter. I don’t know what to say.

It made me realize, though, that this little perversion has some interesting social implications, especially for my single friends out there. The oldest trick in the book when it comes to engaging someone new is to try and spot or highlight something they are wearing, reading or saying. Is this the updated pickup model? It’s now possible to see, quite literally, right through someone.

And don’t let the whole laptop not everywhere thing get you down - have you been to *$ (Starbucks) lately? I’ve seen hundreds of hookups that center around nothing less than that piece of white plastic and metal otherwise known as the iPod. Everyone loves gadgets, it takes a geek to appreciate it.

Do you have stories about digital pickups? Have you used technology to “score”. I bet you have.. and I’d like to know more about them.

Online dating has, for some time, been going through growing pains. As the industry comes to engulf more and more of the traditional dating scene, there is an urgency to fold in the activities and techiques of old-fashioned dating world.

Over the past year or two, many of the larger players have taken to making use of offline dating events and activities to drum up membership and enhance the member experience. Some of these things are interesting, others bizarre. I can’t say for sure that any one works better than the other, having attended several and observed people at them.

Three of the largest players in this business, as of late, are Match.com, True.com, and LavaLife.com. Match has operated MatchLive.com for some time now and performed a large array of events across the country for their members and curious non-members. True.com recently paired up with ClearChannel to do promotions at various concerts and events. LavaLife.com has brought back it’s ClickAtAFlick Wednesday night movie-mingling events.

In the past couple of weeks, however, there’s been a shakedown of sorts. SocialPeople.com has a great bit of news in this arena. Apparently Match.com has suspended all of its offline events. Strange behavior considering the events business was supposedly up 200%. True.com also chopped its business and laid off 90 of its 150 employees (”Some positions eliminated were in marketing and event coordination, which set up parties and speed dating activities.”). The jury is still out on LavaLife.com’s attempt (though $10 for a movie, drinks, and conversation is relatively cheap).

I’m curious what’s happening inside the towers that’s driving this recoil. Perhaps they grew their enterprises too quickly and lost too much? Perhaps there’s no interest (I doubt). Time will tell.

Many people are drawn to online dating because it provides a pressure-free environment to meet people with similar interests. That’s the politically correct answer. Of course, it boils down to people seeking out the hottest looking guy or girl, rattling off a cheesy message, and crossing your fingers (at least if you’re a guy in the maze).

For some time, there’s been a serious issue in terms of validating identities of individuals on the site. Makers like True.com and eHarmony have tried to introduce services that prevent mismatches, either by surveys and profiling or direct identity verification services. Of course, the majority of the problems have come from members of the dating community “faking” information about themselves to increase their change of “success”.

But what do we do when the site publisher is the faker? Till now, it hasn’t been outted — until now. It seems that JDate, a product of MatchNet, has taken to using the photos of adult film stars and models for it’s membership ads. This means that the next person you see that seems too good to be true actually may be. As Haaretz International reports:

However, Haaretz has found that the site’s banners systematically use fictitious characters based on pictures of models taken from pornography sites.

The changing banners carry pictures of different women, all of them young and attractive, and they all invite the surfer to “chat.” Apart from Hila, you can meet Sharon, aged 26, who is also very pretty and single, and like all the girls, she too is looking for a Jewish husband from a good family. At least, that is what the banner says.

But Sharon is Devon Sweet, a model whose homepage says she is a shy student from the United States who “is carrying out an in-depth study into the popularity of bisexuality among young American girls.” And what about the Jewish husband from a good family?

Source: Haaretz.com, ” JDate banners feature pictures of porn models” via GreedyGirl.com

BUT, before you give up faith. MatchNet has confirmed that they purchased the pictures from a photo archive and had no ideal the photos were from porn stars. That aside, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth and breeds suspicion in the minds of many, myself included.

Last week, I mentioned that MatchNet was planning to go public here in the states. It seems that the climate for IPOs is still some what cold and the IPO has been cancelled.

Online dating company MatchNet on Thursday withdrew its plans to sell its shares to the public, joining a growing number of Internet companies that have canceled or postponed a stock market launch.

MatchNet, which operates JDate.com and AmericanSingles.com, said in a statement that it has called off the initial public offering because of the “faltering market for Internet-related IPOs.”

The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based company’s chief executive officer and president, Todd Tappin, announced his resignation, also on Thursday. He is being replaced by MatchNet board member David Siminoff.

Source: News.com, “‘Faltering’ market downs MatchNet IPO”

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about an upcoming Match.com campaign, “Every Single Vote Counts”. It seems the official press release has been made, as discovered by the Social Software Weblog:

An increasing number of businesses recognize that voter projects not only affirm or enhance their image as a good corporate citizen, but also build employee morale and customer relationships. Companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farm, Unilever, Patagonia, Match.com, and Working Assets already have launched campaigns this year.

Match.com, the global leader in online dating, has launched “Every Single Vote Counts,” a voter awareness program aimed at its more than 12 million members. “America’s singles population represents a massive, yet rarely segmented, voting bloc,” said Trish McDermott, Match.com’s V.P. of Romance, referring to the more than 80 million single adults eligible to vote in the U.S.

Voteworks is being launched at a critical time. America ranks 139th among world democracies for voter turnout. One-third of eligible citizens aren’t even registered to vote.

Source: Match.com Press Release via Social Software Weblog

Matchnet, better known to the public world as AmericanSingles.com or JDate.com, has filed for an initial public offering. MatchNet is looking for a listing on the NASDAQ to gain capital for marketing and general costs.

I think it makes perfect sense. What impresses me, however, are the numbers and scale of the company:

In the first six months, the company said, it averaged about 5.3 million unique monthly online visitors, which according to an online rating study ranked MatchNet as the second-largest online personals provider among Internet users in the United States.

MatchNet, which started operations in September 1998, said that as of June 30, it had about 9.8 million active members who have posted a personal profile or who have logged on at least once in the last year.

Source: News.com, “Online-dating company files for IPO”

One thing I have been very curious about is the solidarity of dating. By this, I mean how secluded is the activity of dating from the rest of our lives. Online dating sites are very focused on the directory of people and matching them to each other. SNS applications are very focused on the connections, but they stray into other arenas. Friendster is one of the few that is a “dating” SNS, but it really falls down by traditional measures.

Can business and personal co-exist? I tend to think yes, but not in the infrastructure we see in place now.

Match.com was on TV today speaking about their new campaign to get single Americans out for the vote. I haven’t been able to find a link to anything related to the campaign, but one two interesting statistics came out of the interview:

• 39 million singles already do not vote, whereas couples are more likely to vote
• Being registered to vote makes you more sexy, apparently. In a brief survey of 1600 singles, 91% of respondents indicated someone was more attractive if you are a registered voter

Who knew.

I’m currently in Gatwick with Stowe, waiting for our plane to Amsterdam. Yesterday was a great success at the London Symposium on Social Tools (STES).

Continuing with my look into Digital Identity and preparing for the iDate Conference in two days, here’s some interesting news from True.com. The notion of Projected versus Public Identity creates uneasiness and risk for many users on online tools. Often , individuals are left wondering if the individual they are reading about, chatting with, or otherwise engaging is who they say they are, or real at all.

The Online Dating world has been at grips for some time with these identity issues and has come up with a wide array of social and legal barriers that lower the opportunity costs of identity fraud. In the latest effort, from newly minted True.com, we’re seeing a concerted legal effort to introduce background checks into the process.

True today announced that it is launching a state-by-state campaign in support of legislation requiring online dating services to conduct criminal background checks or to prominently disclose to its members if an online dating service chooses not to provide this safety-enhancing service. Already garnering strong support in the company’s home State of Texas, Senator John Carona and State Representative Will Hartnett have joined True’s safety movement as sponsors of the legislation.

Source: Online Dating News, “True.com Launches Background Check Legislation” via True Press Release

Looking back, historically, True is in fact NOT the only service that uses background checks, there have been many before. These issues certainly will come to dominate many discussions about Online Dating. Looking forward, as “profiles” become more and more a part of our connected lives and identities fly from the hip, we can only expect that there will be very serious social concerns stemming from the exchange and (mis)use of these identities.

In some ways the notion behind GooDate is quite interesting. The basic idea focuses on the evil truth about online dating: it’s a lot of work. The process of searching, filtering, qualifying, and dating is not just time-consuming, it’s downright stressful. Now, take that experience and multiply it across the multitude of sites that you can use to find your next date and you can see how this becomes a major undertaking.

The promise of GooDate, it seems, is that you can consolidate your searching efforts using a veritable dating meta-search engine. Currently, you configure your search criteria and then you can pivot those results to see across match.com, Yahoo!, FriendFinder, AmericanSingles, and WebDate, though the promise is there that there will indeed be “More Sites”. Somewhat disappointing, however, is that the results aren’t blended. If anything, I am going to assume that this is a technical limitation since the results would have to be scraped in more detail.

Of course, the problem is both the branding and the re-branding. On the one hand, they’ve chosen to “lift” a large part of the branding from Google (pending lawsuit 1). On the other hand, they are re-branding/purposing the search results from some of the largest players in the business (pending lawsuits 2,3,4). Now I could be wrong, and there could be agreements in place to authorize this use, but I just don’t get the feeling that’s the case.

So in summary, interesting idea but plagued with issues.