I was cleaning out my Yahoo! Personals mailbox and re-found a useful feature- the ability to easily let people know that you are (not) interested in them. Most times people either delete the email or send a generic wink and move on, depending on the circumstance. At Yahoo!, once you have selected email(s) to delete, you are presented with a drop-down list of common courtesy replies. You are also presented this option from your inbox after you choose to view someone. A great idea, why don't more services offer this option?

Love.com is offering two weeks free when you subscribe for 30 days. Click on the thumbnail to view a larger version of the image. The 30-day subscription is $14.95. Interesting to note that most SpringStreet partners charge on a credit-to-connect basis yet the AOL deal is subscription-based. Love.com is an AOL property powered by SpringStreet Networks., but you probably knew that already.

The Red Sox win World Series

The curse is officially over!!!

Love em or hate em, banner ads turned ten years old on October 25. AdLand is showing the first banner ad ever and 'you will' banner, and the commercials from 1994 that go with it. The banners turned ten years old October 25, 2004.

I was part of the group that uploaded the first AT&T ad to Hotwired. Looking back, I'm amazed at how far online advertising has come as a medium, as well as how primitive the tools are today. Case in point, dating sites are still unable to target customers based on their demographics to any useful extent. Where is the online dating advertising agency? I don't want to pitch my product to your stale list of opt-ins, I want to build dynamic ads on the fly that cater to your visitors immediate needs. Where are the tools to do this?
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Quest Personals affiliates now earn commissions for the life of a Quest member. Quest boasts of over 100,000 unique visitors.

"The advantage to dating affiliates," explains Susan Arts, Product Manager for Questpersonals.com, "is that new members often buy the most cost-effective subscription available, just to test the waters. Members will invest in larger (and more expensive) subscription packages once they've made a few connections. Most affiliates miss out on the bigger purchases, since they traditionally earn commissions only on the smaller initial purchase. Our affiliates earn on everything."

"First Media is an established industry leader, and one of the largest North American providers of interactive technologies for the personals market. In operation for over 15 years, our focus is on providing our customers with fun, easy-to-use tools for meeting or chatting with others in their local, or global communities at great value."

With so many dating industry executives floating around looking for something to do I thought I would throw out an idea for a new dating service.

First, I'll buy a dating site from aedating. Or Relationship Exchange for that matter. Then I'll license community apps from Userplane, drop in identify verfication from Trufina and talk Transparensee into giving us a copy of their search technology so we can create more compelling search capabilities.

Then I would go license personality profiling tools and create a short and sweet profile builder that was extendable with additional questions based on users interests.

I'd add a customer support area that does just that, supports customers. Too many sites out there are great at taking your c.c information but strangely absent when it comes to helping newbies figure out what the heck a Favorites List is.

I'll partner with ProfileDoctor (Disclaimer, that's me), maybe sign up a few relationship coaches from True for the upscale set. How about partnering with 8minutedating for speed dating and figuring out something to do with all of the canned Live Events people at Match?

Next up, savvy marketing people to come up with a killer tag line and someone who knows how to write a press release to spread the word. I'm constantly amazed at how poorly most dating sites are at communicating with customers and the press. Have you read the releases coming out of dating services? Ugh. Talented marketing folks are all over the place these days. They've been there, done that, and know what it takes to succeed. Mostly because they watched their previous employers screw up so much.

After that, go sign up a few affinity groups, like Starbucks, Virgin and T-mobile for customer base. Maybe talk to AARP to hit up those seniors.

I'd add a rating system too, so you could tell the cellar-dwellers from the right stuff.

I wouldn't spend much time on mobile stuff unless I was going to play in EU, because mobile dating in the US hasn't found it's footing yet and unless you absolutely must hook up in the next 10 minutes, being home in front of a monitor scanning the "new members" feed is much more appealing than trying to get a cell signal in a bar on a tiny screen. Plus, EU is mostly locked up between 2-3 services already.

If things were looking good at this point maybe I would buy up a few choice small players. Give them a check and say "Thanks for playing" and import their members into the system. There are so many people wasting their time trying to get a date online at these tiny sites, let's give consumers what they need. Lot's of people, exciting experience and ongoing new features.

Finally, I'll go raise $10 million to begin marketing my NextGenDating.com service to the masses. If you don't come to the table with that kind of money you have no business starting a new dating site these days unless you expect it to be nothing more than a hobby. Shouldn't take more than a handful of people and a few months to get to 50k paying customers, since consumers seem to be dying for an alternative to the Big 5 dating sites and the niche sites don't seem to be able to effectively market themselves. Even if they could none of them have the money to make it happen.

Lastly, I'd create an XML feed (with ads) of everyone in the database and let developers create all sorts of apps to slice, dice, search and categorize members. People should be able to get their singles feed through their newsreader, personal portal, blog or wherever. I'd tag members with their advertising preferences so ad networks can finally market directly with pinpoint accuracy. How come nobody has figured this stuff out yet?

I've left out some of the secret sauce on purpose, partly to find out what your thoughts are. What would you do differently?

Vertrue Incorporated (Nasdaq: VTRU), reported revenues of $135.6 million, compared to $113.8 million reported in the fiscal 2004 first quarter, and $133.2 million reported in the fiscal 2004 fourth quarter. Revenues from Lavalife Inc., which was acquired on April 1, 2004 were $18.3 million in the fiscal 2005 first quarter and $17.7 million in the fiscal 2004 fourth quarter.
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I received an email from Match to participate in their survey. Mark Williamson, Director of Research at Match.com, is responsible for the survey. I took it, and here are my initial comments.

Ideas they are testing

1) Ability to turn off ads on the Match.com site
2) Opportunity to have higher placement in search results
3) Stand out in search results with a different color profile

Match website is definitely too crowded and busy these days, removing ads might help with the clutter.

Higher placement and colored profiles is straight from FriendFinder playbook, nothing new there. Higher placement in search results is interesting, although no info on how they would do this. Currently the only way to stay on top is to log in several times a day.

Be one of the first profiles that a new member sees
Profile highlighting
$37.95

Priority Placement in Search Results & Profile highlighting & turn off ads
$37.45

Be the first to be seen by new users
$34.19

Priority Placement in Search Results
Profile highlighting
Be the first to be seen by new users
Turn Off Ads
$39.29

Priority Placement in Search Results
Be the first to be seen by new users
$35.95

Priority Placement in Search Results
Profile highlighting
$36.69

General Membership
$29.95

Lot's of other variations I won't go into here.

Proposed prices for these services are confusing and the survey was tedious. They asked the same questions overand over with slight tweaks to price and offer. By the 12th page I was just clicking buttons to get over with it The last page is totally out of place, asking you 20 or so questions about your personality. You can't finish the survey without clicking a radio button for each selection. These questions definitely belonged in a separate survey.

We'll see what they do with the data they gather. Upping prices could be a disaster, but the highlighting stuff is a good move, as proven by several other services already.

The October Userplane Partner newsletter mentions that they have a partner program in place. Check out the website for more information.

I was checking out FriendFinder and all it's associated sites and came across ConfirmID, which is providing identity verification to the FriendFinder network. ConfirmID provides exclusive 3rd party verification services for many of the leaders of online personals. I've started a Safety category to filter identity verification and security posts, as this segment is going to pop over the next few months.

Bugaboo Incorporated announced today the launch of a new web site that enables individuals to share feedback on people they have met through an online dating service. The site, called theDateScoop.com, is believed to be the first dedicated as a dater feedback forum and is available for viewing at thedatescoop.com.

This feedback will include the chance to reveal an assessment regarding the honesty of an online profile. Additionally, members may express a number of other opinions about their date, including positive feedback, fun facts, and humorous comments. Members may also pay for additional services, including the ability to view details from the feedback database on themselves and other online daters. Like eCRUSH and a few others.

Instead of paying for a subscription that gives you access to services for a limited time, their credit system allows you to spend them whenever you like. 15 Credits for $ 7.95, Unlimited/6 Months for $32.95.

There are a lot of issues with these types of services. Disgruntled dates, ever-changing screen names, multiple memberships to several dating sites, etc. The real cellar-dwellers will always be able to foil these services, it remains to be seen if they can get enough traction where people will fill out post-date forms. Reputation management is the next big thing in online dating, prepare for an onslaught of services catering to this niche.

Yahoo has a new personality test called the Yahoo Personality & Love Style test. It was developed by WeAttract, the same people who developed the Match Personality and Physical Attraction tests.

In less than 10 minutes, you will receive a free, personalized report that details the type of person you are, and your Love Style (which is how you love). You will also receive advice, guidance and tips, as well as information on how to approach prospective dates.

Good stuff: Decent design and UI, much better than the previous attempts to integrate personality testing from a few years ago. Selecting your choice through a series of buttons on right side is quite clear. I like how I can compare myself with others, gives me a sense that I know where I stand in the personality spectrum. The final report looks exactly like the Match report.

Needs Work: Took too to long to complete. I got tired of it after about 3 minutes. Can't anyone figure out how to ask the right 20 questions?

You should be allowed to select your general personality type so you don't have to listen to all the other people who are nothing like you.

Can't fast forward through the accompanying audio.

When you're done, you are told that "It's quick and easy to complete your profile using insights you've gained from your Personality and Love Style Report." That's a big stretch of the imagination to think that a new Yahoo! Personals user is going to be able to translate what they learned in the test into their profile. I wrote a 10 page document about the test-profile feedback loop and they didn't come close to explaining what to do with the info. a bit too much like a test over at Tickle. Fun to take but if it's not tied directly into the system it's not worth much. I'm sure Yahoo! will integrate the test at some point. If they don't they're missing a great opportunity.

You can take the test here.

Red Sox are in the World Series. What birthday present could be better than that?

Cellar-dweller alert! From BoingBoing: Mobilehookup has come out with a service that enables two people who haven't met to talk live - for five minutes - on the telephone while protecting user privacy and anonymity. According to Voice Courier Mobile, not only does this mean members retain control of the dating situation but similar to speed-dating, they are better equipped to quickly decide whether or not to continue with a relationship. I wonder what kind of people this type of service would attract?

Match continues to clean house this week. Latest to leave are a Sr. VP of Marketing and a Product Manager. Their axed live events staff are circulating resumes as well.

Here are some of the highlights (for those with a geek gene) of a Microsoft Enterprise Case Study featuring Match.com.

In June 2001, the new Match.com- consisting of 20 front-end Web servers, running Windows 2000 Server with Internet Information Services version 5.0 on dual-processor HP ProLiant systems, and three back-end database servers, running Windows 2000 Advanced Server and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition on quad-processor ProLiant servers- went live.

Developers built their new application using Active Server Pages (ASP) classes to gain modularity of ASP code and took advantage of Microsoft's ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) programming model to access data sources faster and more effectively. They moved significant portions of the site's business logic to SQL Server 2000 stored procedures. The results? Match.com achieved significant performance improvements and was able to scale by a factor of 10 in just one short year.

Before the upgrade, Match was pumping out nearly 30 megabits (MBits) of personal pages per second around the clock. During the first 12 months after going live with the Windows 2000 operating system and outsourcing management of the infrastructure to divine, Match.com scaled its operations significantly- going from 20 Web servers to more than 120 and from 3 database servers to more than 20. Yet in those 12 months, Match.com has gone from pumping out less than 30 MBits of search results per second to pumping out more than 300 MBits of results per second. On a monthly basis, the site now gets more than 1 billion page views.
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Userplane announced that its site for Red Bull's Re:Evolution of Sports, an extreme sports TV show airing on the Fox Sports Network --- has received the 2004 Web Award from the Web Marketing Association. Re:Evolution of Sports is one of the first television shows broadcast online, and represents the next level of media convergence. Using Macromedia Flash Communication Server, Userplane developed a streaming video library of television episodes for the program, a show that focuses on the unique lifestyle of extreme athletes. Fully streamed episodes can be viewed on the Re:Evolution of Sports website.

The personals business is warming up to the concept of viral marketing. Last week I heard from Tom Jaffe, President of 8minuteDating. 8minute has a promotion that goes like this: if you can get three people to register for one of their speed dating events, you'll go free and they each receive $5 the event fee. Cool. I wonder how much of Match's discontinued live event traffic will get picked up by the speed dating companies, lock & key parties, etc? Today, I received an email from greatboyfriends.com which started out "relaxed, you delicious kumquat!" asking me to refer a friend for a free week on the service. What is it with the kooky writing over there?

Enpocket, the leading mobile media solutions provider, today announced that it has completed the acquisition of Landmat, a global provider of mobile community and content applications. Enpocket provides applications and services to more than 50 mobile operators and 400 brands in the US, Europe and Asia. Landmat is a global leader in providing dating, chatting and mblogging applications to the world's leading operators such as Vodafone, Cingular, Verizon, Telefonica, T-Mobile and Singtel. Landmat has also succeeded in mobilizing brands such as Match.com, Discovery Channel and Time Out across multiple networks and territories.With these combined resources and experience, Enpocket can now enable its clients to build their own loyal communities by accelerating mobile subscribers' understanding and use of the mobile medium.

I've tried, and been disappointed by, various mobile phone-based dating services in the past. Perhaps these companies can improve the experience to the point where people over 25 will actually see them as worthwhile. No phone-based app beats checking out dating site search results on a 21" monitor, but they are great for Location-based services like Toothing.

Today TRUE announced the Michigan legislature has become the fifth state to commit to its monumental legislative cause. The Michigan House of Representatives approved the bill with a bipartisan vote of 75 to 14, spearheaded by Michigan Representative Jim Howell (R - St. Charles). The bill is now headed to the Senate for approval. With this affirmative vote, Michigan becomes the first state to pass the bill in its House.

Where is the public discourse about the issues? Why are lawmakers passing bills that fail to thoroughly addresses issues such as how to implement identity verification systems? I guess they read this - A recent survey conducted by Russell Research found that in Michigan, for example, seven out of ten registered voters (72 percent) would support state legislation that would make it a requirement for online dating sites to pre-screen its members against criminal databases. Of these, 78 percent of female and 65 percent of male registered voters would support the legislation at the state level.
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SpringStreet has increased the frequency of their marketing outreach to existing customers. They are inviting members to "Email hot profiles" to their non-member friends. Viral marketing that ends with a typically silly fill-in-the-blank question. While I cherish the thought of winning the "World's Greatest Friend award" they could have given away free credits or schwag from one of their partners, like a subscription to Nerve.com at least.

Adrants has a link to a story about an Australian Chinese woman who has spent $5,000 to buy a billboard in Randwick for a month advertising for a husband. She is quite nonchalant about the whole thing, "I'm surprised a lot of people think this is special or unusual," she said. "It's Australia. There's a lot of freedom here. If you can put up a sign advertising Coca-Cola or whatever, why not write one about a husband.

Cowgirl Connie says: What sets CowboyDate apart from the rest? Simple - we're the only online dating web site for Cowboys and Cowgirls! The ability to find other Cowboys and Cowgirls has never been easier, safer and more fun than now! Whether you're looking for love, romance, a dancin' partner or just a date, CowboyDate.com was built just for you, the Cowboy and the Cowgirl.

The tag line is "If you can rope me - you can have me", nice!

A Detroit-area It's Just Lunch franchise is making up to $125,000 a month. "Detroit has been ranked one of the worst places to date because people spend so much of their lives in cars", says Paula Komar, who invested $150,000 last year. The article also mentions that Match.com has 99,000 subscribers in southeast Michigan alone.

I wonder how well IJL does in LA.
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I just found out that CNBC aired a segment on HotorNot.com that quoted me. It would cost $700 to post the clip here, what's up with that? It was interesting to hear the reporter pumping me for positive quotes, I had not heard anything about the site in years. Hotornot is encouraging election awareness by giving away $200,000 on their voteornot.com website, which is down right now. I wonder how much ad revenue they will generate? Judging by Alexa traffic ranking (your mileage may vary) they received a huge spike from the PR blitz announcing the sweepstakes. I've had my photo on hotornot since day four and my average rating is down to 2.5, sigh.

PerfectMatch.com (www.perfectmatch.com), the premiere online relationship destination, today announced its partnership with Classmates.com (www.classmates.com), a leading online community where 38 million members find, connect and stay in touch with friends and acquaintances from school, work and the military. The partnership provides Classmates.com members the opportunity to experience compatibility, love and relationships through PerfectMatch.com.

This looks to be a smart move. PerfectMatch has a nice website, Dr. Pepper Johnson on board and a nice signup process. Guess they think that when I'm looking up old girlfriends on the interweb that I'll want to join a dating service when I find out she's married and has 5 kids.
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MemberWorks Incorporated (NASDAQ: MBRS), a leading marketing solutions company, announced today that it has completed its re-branding as Vertrue Incorporated (NASDAQ: VTRU). Shares are expected to begin trading under the new ticker symbol on Friday, October 15, 2004. "We have successfully evolved from a third-party marketer to a leading marketing solutions company," said Gary Johnson, president and chief executive officer of Vertrue Incorporated. "Vertrue represents our focus on consumer value, expansion into direct-to-consumer marketing, and new client marketing opportunities. Our tag line 'Get more out of life every day,' summarizes the direction we've taken."
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Spearheaded by TRUE's chief psychological officer, Dr. James Houran, the paper, entitled "Do Online Matchmaking Tests Work? An Assessment of Preliminary Evidence for a Publicized 'Predictive Model of Marital Success,'" is the first academic publication to explore the growing acceptance of online matchmaking as a scientifically legitimate approach to mate selection. The paper further explores the claims of several online dating sites that their services and testing methods derived from scientific foundations.

This stuff interests me, it's definitely going to be a major factor in the success of online dating services. In a few years.

Call it marketing through scientific journals. I'm surprised that eHarmony didn't write this first. The major online dating services have proven that psychological testing doesn't mean much when it comes to finding out if your partner is compatible. For most people, that happens during the first date. All the tests I've taken are either too long, the questions sound like they were cooked up in a lab full of people in white coats who got married as undergrads or they insult your intelligence. "Celebrity I resemble most?", come on. Nobody takes these things seriously. Women get far too many emails from unsavory characters and men complain that nobody responds to their emails. Let's fix that first before we worry about inkblots and predictive modeling. Hopefully I'll be able to post a free link to the article when it's published and you can form your own opinion.
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Yahoo! earned 53 million, or 17 cents per share in the third quarter. Excluding a net impact of $129 million related to the sale of its investment in Google and a tax benefit, the company earned $124 million, or 9 cents per share, up from 5 cents last year. Analysts pegged Yahoo's earnings to come in at 9 cents a share. The online media company said sales grew 154 percent to $907 million. Excluding the cost it pays to Web distribution partners, revenue grew to $655 million from $357 million in the comparable period a year ago.

Fees from Yahoo mail, personals and the Internet access business rose 31 percent to $104 million, driven by strength in a growing number of subscribers. The company said it ended the quarter with 7.6 million paying subscribers, bringing it closer to having 8 million by year's end. Last quarter, Yahoo generated the same amount of fees, but it had 6.4 million paying subscribers.

It's too bad they don't break out their Personals unit performance like Match. There could be some gotcha's in there that we can't identify. Mail is free, not sure about internet access except that they have a deal with SBC.

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I've gotten several emails from site that supposedly compare online dating services. The last one was www.onlinedating-sites.com, which is basically a few general categories full of affiliate banner ads. Not a single comparison to be found. If your website compares dating sites or lists them along with relevant, useful information (not just a bunch of banner ads), email me and I'll add you to a new category in the sidebar. When we get enough listed, I'm going to get a third party to do a shootout of the review sites.

I'm back after 4 days unplugged in the Virginia countryside. Good article in E-Commerce Times titled "Signs that online dating growth is slowing down."

Highlights (or lowlights?)

In September, market leader Match.com, a property of IAC/InterActive (IACI), laid off 30 people and replaced its longtime CEO. Rival True.com cut 90 employees, or 60 percent of its workforce. In August, MatchNet, which owns dating sites JDate.com and AmericanSingles.com, canned its initial public offering. The outfit cited unfavorable market conditions, and its president and CEO has resigned.

Growth rates for the established players are slowing rapidly. The U.S. market will expand a mere 19.4 percent this year, to US$473 million, according to market consultancy Jupiter Research. And growth will rise only 32 percent, to $623 million, over the following five years.

"The big growth in the U.S. is over," says Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter in New York. "Things are going to get a little bit tougher. Companies are going to have to buckle down."

There's a lot of good info about mobile, AOL and Playboy's plans, so go read it.
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You'll notice some new features on the site, including improved organization, an ad and the shiny new videoblog. Why not review the archives and categories while I'm away for the weekend and provide comments and insights on previous posts. I'll bump them to the top for further discussion. You can also email me what's on your mind.

Seasoned, savvy writer seeks creative role at edgy, foreward-thinking agency. Experience includes everything from Black & Decker, and Seagram's to New Freedom and Six Flags.Freelance or full-time. Awards include Clios, a feature in Archive and most recently, an Emmy. Call 214-537-1757.

Singles-Flirt up your Life! is the simulation of the exciting relationship between Mike and Linda. The game places players in the role of matchmaker. Choosing from over a dozen, unique characters, the player will pick two people to move into a sparsely decorated apartment and begin their adventure together as new roommates. Numerous opportunities to engage the characters in situations will make or break their relationship in the house.

This is great. Perhaps it should be included with dating service signup pages.
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MatchUp Singles is using a smartcard for F2F matching sessions. Developed by Interactive Digital Corporation, a privately held developer of advanced online and physical matchmaking services, users point the MatchUp SmartCard at another MatchUp Smart Card owner, press the button, and wait for the magic to begin. Instantly, you will both see how your results compared. The display will tell you your overall MatchUp score as well as how you matched in each of the 6 hot zones.

I picked up a woman in a crowded bar by beaming my stats to her with my Apple Newton back in 1993. Glad to see someone taking it to the next level. MIT has legions of people in the wearable computing labs working on this stuff. It would be cool to see a branded Personals Network, where a dating company would "host" the interaction.
Your own PAN (personal area network). Somebody at IDC, send me one of these and I'll write it up here.
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According to USA Today, 7/29/04, Match.com “employs more than 100 people to read every bit of data that a subscriber inputs, which is then checked for consistency and oddities,” says then-president Tim Sullivan, who adds that 2,000 people are booted off the site every month because data doesn’t square.”

MemberWorks' management will host a conference call at 9:00 a.m. EDT on October 26, 2004 to discuss the Company's first quarter results. To listen to the conference call, please dial (800) 369-3147 five to ten minutes before the scheduled start time. Callers will need to enter pass code "MBRS". The conference call will also be available live on the investor relations page of the Company's web site at www.memberworks.com. Please go to the web site at least fifteen minutes prior to the call to register and download any necessary audio software. For those who cannot listen to the live broadcast, an audio replay of the call will be available approximately one hour after the completion of the call and will remain available until November 6, 2004. To listen to the audio replay, please call (800) 839-1170. A web cast replay of the conference call will also be available on the investor relations page of the Company's web site approximately 2 hours after the end of the call and remain available until November 6, 2004.

Memberworks acquired Lavalife in April 2004.
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IAC/InterActiveCorp. Chief Executive Barry Diller said Tuesday he would not rule out taking the Internet conglomerate private, but has no immediate plans to do so. "If, in fact, there were an opportunity to do so that was overwhelmingly compelling, we would do it," Diller said at the Goldman Sachs media and technology conference in New York. "There is some compulsion but it is nowhere near overwhelming," said Diller, whose company's holdings include travel site Expedia.com, mortgage broker LendingTree and dating service Match.com. Shares of IAC fell 95 cents, or 4.3 percent, to $21.21 in morning trade on Nasdaq. The shares had risen last month on speculation that Diller would take the company private for $29 a share. The shares are down 21.5 percent from early August when the company cut its 2004 earnings forecast due to stiffer competition in the travel market.
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After reaching the half-million-member milestone in January, 2004, MingleMatch doubled number of memberships in only nine months."Reaching this one-million profile benchmark validates the efforts of the MingleMatch team in creating the right environment to attract and retain quality singles," said Ben Peterson, president of MingleMatch. From September 2003 to September 2004, paid sign-ups on MingleMatch sites increased 133 percent. MingleMatch is a privately held company that manages and maintains demographically targeted singles communities online. With more than 20 niche online dating sites, MingleMatch provides its services to hundreds-of-thousands of single men and women.

1,000,000 / 20 sites = average of 50,000 members per site. If each site grew twofold in 9 months, sites averaged 25,000 members each in January. No indication on original paid subs to use as a base to give some perspective to the 133% growth claim.
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eHarmony call centers currently handle over 100,000 customer inquiries each month by phone, email and live chat, and the company projects the number of "customer care" representatives alone to grow by 25 percent by the end of 2004. In response to the call center's extended operations 7 days a week, high volume of communications with members, and thousands of new users who join the service each month, eHarmony plans to open a new 7000 square foot, consolidated call center facility to keep pace with growing customer needs.

Most major dating services have 50 or some customer care reps, many who double as profile reviewers who filter out negative content from profiles. 100,000 customer inquiries seems like a lot to me. Another industry metric to measure?
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Did you know that Peng T. Ong was a co-founder and chief architect of Electric Classifieds, Inc (the creators of Match.Com)? I didn't either. Previously, Peng was a consultant at Illustra Information Technologies, Inc. and also held various engineering and management roles at Sybase, Inc. and Gensym Corporation. I loved what Ilustra was doing (datablades!), before they got bought by Informix, who then got gobbled up by IBM. Imagine if a large dating service opened up their services to 3rd parties who could extend the search, chat and connect capabilities using datablades (think specific custom modules)? Developers would go nuts, quickly creating the functionality that consumers need, not what your VC thinks you should develop to appease shareholders. Oh, and Peng also started Interwoven too. What an overachiever.

SpringStreet has added a new feature to their Hot List functionality. If you opt in to Hot List Match Notifications you can see who as added you to their Hot List. It's been done before, but this is the first new feature from SpringStreet in a while. If your service has a a new or novel feature, let me know.
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My blog policy is not to remove posts but in this case I'm getting tired of hearing from the management at boatdating.com. The home page there looks strange on a Mac and I pointed this out in an earlier post. Instead of fixing the problem and being thankful it was caught in time, they responded by threatening me with being liable for slander and misrepresentation. Guys, you need to get and stay on message. You also need to look into a new webmaster, because I certainly didn't take the time out of a glorious New England weekend to doctor up a screenshot of your web page just for something to write about, come on now.

Michigan lawmakers voted 75-14 this week to approve a bill by Rep. Jim Howell, R-St. Charles, requiring Internet matchmakers to prominently disclose whether criminal background checks have been made. The bill was introduced at the request of Herb Vest, a Dallas businessman who founded True.com. The legislation doesn't require background checks. Instead, it requires services with Michigan members to warn people on their Web sites whether background checks have been conducted. It would also distinguish between an FBI background check based on a name, or a less-reliable commercial service that tries to capture public records. Howell -- who said he knows little about dating services since he's married -- said enforcing Internet business is tricky. He said his bill will instead make it easier for people to sue if they've been ripped off or hurt by a date and the dating service lied about background checks. It would be limited to actual damages or $250,000, whichever is lower. Link (reg. req'd)

Incode Corporation today announced the formation of its Intrance online dating service development unit to administer Incode's various online dating properties. Incode also announced its plans to rebrand KissyKat, a special interest online dating service devoted to pet and animal lovers and their community, as dateFetch in connection with the completion of Incode's proposed acquisition by BIB Holdings, Ltd. ("BIB") (OTC Bulletin Board: BIBO).

Incode's plans are to acquire, develop and commercialize a number of niche-driven online dating services, including its previously announced KissyKat and VanityDate properties. Consolidating these brands under the Intrance banner is a component of Incode's strategy to leverage the cost efficiencies of its core match-making technologies. Incode's expectation is that its match-making engine will be used to enhance the efficiency of and return on investment for each of Incode's additional planned match-making oriented acquisitions and projects.

They're aiming for 25,000 paying subscribers at the end of year on, at $19.95/month. Based on 30 million consumer impressions. That $6 million. I wonder how they came up with 30 million consumer impressions? If thats based on PPC, that's a 1.2 % conversion rate. "Since the bulk of the capital expense on the technology is returned through the first portal's growth, each subsequent portal based on the underlying technology has a more rapid return on investment." And then it's all about the marketing dollars. Link