Look out, recommendation engines are hot again. In 1996 it was all about Firefly, then Amazon, followed by Netflix and now a whole new crop of players are emerging, from Attention Trust to Pandora, who's leader I saw speak at MIT a few weeks ago. Great story how they got from the Music Genome Project to Pandora.

In the dating space, we have eHarmony on one end of the spectrum (it's the algorithm, baby), to Engage (people matching people) on the other.

There is plenty of room in the middle for various recommendation systems based on favorite brands, bands and clothing. I always have friends list brands in their personal ads. As the driver of a heavily-modified Passat (watch out BMW 325 drivers!), I'm pretty sure I'm not going to want to date an Escalade driver but I would buy a Prius driver a coffee to see if we are a good fit.

PayPal co-founder Max Levchin “is using what he learned at PayPal, not to root out fraud but to create the best recommender system he can imagine, one that will cover the entire Web, pulling content of all kinds - music, movies, gadgets, blogs, news stories, cars, one-night stands, you name it - filtering it according to individual preference and delivering it to the desktop.”

If Slide is at all familiar, it's as a knockoff of Flickr, the photo-sharing site. Users upload photos, which are displayed on a running ticker or Slide Show, and subscribe to one another's feeds. But photos are just a way to get Slide users communicating, establishing relationships, Levchin explains.

The site is beginning to introduce new content into Slide Shows. It culls news feeds from around the Web and gathers real-time information from, say, eBay auctions or Match.com profiles. It drops all of this information onto user desktops and then watches to see how they react.

Pulling Match profile photos? That's going to go over well in Texas. Word is that Riya is talking to various dating sites as well. Will Slide be the first to launch photo-based matching and ask permission from dating sites later?

The idea of watching a scrolling list of products and identifying what I find appealing is somewhat nauseating. Surfing a photostream which is continually refined based on the hive mind and my preferences is much more appealing. I didn't see any Match.com import feature on Slide, perhaps this is to come in the future. For now, we'll have to keep tweaking search parameters on dating sites to find each other.

Technorati Tags: collaborative+filtering, recommendation, slide

Ticonderoga Ventures has rebranded iDate, the only online dating industry conference on US soil, as the Social Networking Conference, complete with a separate website.

While I understand the need to cover social networking as it pertains to online dating, social networking conferences are generally all on the left coast, specifically in the Bay area. That's where the deal flow, startups and money is located. There are at least 10 get togethers each month in San Francisco alone that focus on social networking. For online dating executives, it's simple, iDate is the only game in town. If iDate is to pull serious social network sponsors and speakers they're going to have to prove the value of the conference.

Take a moment to leave a comment if you think I should ask to speak at iDate. I missed last year and look forward to seeing you all there. Either in the halls or by the pool, where the real action happens.

Update: There is one slot left for iDate speakers.

Technorati Tags: idate, socialnetworkingconference

Single Parent Love Life is a new online community created for single parents and the enlightened singles open to meeting them. The founders are ex-Lavalife alumnae. I love the niche, single parents are a whole market to themselves, and are totally under served in the dating market.

I'm a bit of a design snob. There is a blend of Flash, intuitive UI and features than 2% of all dating sites get right, which is why I won't touch PoF and other uglier than sin sites out there. SPLL is refreshing on the eyes. Sure it has the obligatory hot momma on the front page but she's surrounded by toys, a nice touch that's easy to identify with. Nice use of Flash, not too over the top, and the colors are pleasing to the eye.

The profiles leave a lot to be desired in terms of public information and I don't like the Things That Define Me. A bunch of adjectives does nothing these days. Can't event tell how many kids they have or how old they are.

What's up the the TV channel? A video of a sexy mom dirty dancing with her daughter? All that was missing was a pole for her to spin around. That weirded me out big time.

I'm not so hot on the coffee mugs, messenger bag and muscle tee's either. I do like the Lush, WaySpa and Meet Market Adventures partnerships. We'll see what kind of revenue they bring to the site.

I like the site overall, it's a good start, and single parents might flock to this given the branding, initial partnerships and previous experience the founders have.

Technorati Tags: single+parents

True.com spends who knows how much money over the course of a year to sue a sexual predator and now Markus at PlentyOfFish helps get a murderer captured in a few hours. Good job Markus. This brings up the issue of how sites deal with sharing personal information about members with police and whether or not these circumstances are adequately covered by the PoF terms of service.

Another quality quote from Markus:

I've made 112 million introductions since the site started. One in 8 million people get hit by lightning in the U.S.

I need more coffee to understand that.

Technorati Tags: plentyoffish

A certain high-ranking official with close ties to the clandestine dating/social-networking industrial complex has forwarded me top secret footage of recently-release video of Eharmony's CEO speaking with Marketwatch's Bambi Francisco.

Bambi Francisco :Have subscriber Acquisition Costs (SAC) gone up for eHarmony?

Greg Waldorf: No.

Dave, talking to monitor: Greg, what's up with the eye roll? Looks like the prompter was up in the ceiling.

BF: Match grew 22% to $80 million last quarter.
GW: eHarmony is growing at about the same rate as Match.

BF: Revenue growth for 2007?

GW: Next year's revenue growth will be most likely due to subscriber base increase, not price increase. Emphasis mine.

Dave to monitor: Bambi, ask him how much of that $110 million is left in the bank.

BF asking her usual questions. How many subscribers?

GW: We don't break out our individual subscriber counts. Many hundreds of thousands.

GW: 14 million signups since inception.

BF: What is average lifetime of a subscribe and how to you value your subscribers.

GW: We value them on trying to make them successful.

Dave: Nice dodge!

BW: applying pressure...

GW: Lifetime value of subscriber is well over $100. We don't break out into months.

BF: What new services are coming next?

GW: Serious R&D. New services for married couples in wellness space.

Dave: Nothing about expansion plans that have been pinging around the blogosphere.

BF: Spark has 26 niche sites. Talks about the network's demographics, pays homage of sorts.

GW: eHarmony relies on an algorithm.

Dave: Wishes he could have coached Greg on that one. That was a giant softball question he totally threw away.

BF: Average subscription price?

BF: I can tell you that 90 people get married every day on eHarmony.

Dave: !!!!!

What did we learn during this interview?
We don't know how many subscribers eHarmony has. Could be 300-700k.

We don't know much about what they are going to do to grow the business.

The CEO refuses to quote how much he charges for his service.

That drove me particularly nuts. How can you not have a price? I hear unsubstantiated reports that they are giving away free and multiple months to people so who really knows except the CFO what's going on there?

Eharmony spent more than $60 million advertising in 2005. It raised $110 million in 2004. EHarmony projected 100,000 marriages on the site in 2005. Looks like the actual number was about 17,000 people.

Technorati Tags: eharmony

It appears Match.com has finally had enough of watching True.com come out of nowhere to cruise past them in the unique visitor rankings at Hitwise (at least according to Hitwise).

Here we have the latest Match ads on Myspace, which feature the video of various women looking at their webcams or Match profiles, I'm not sure which. Being that Match doesn't offer video profiles, I'd say I've never seen a woman so happy looking a personal ad. The ad links to search results for women in southern California. I don't have a female Myspace profile (there are only so many hours in the day), so I can't tell if they get SoCal hunks on their Myspace pages.

Unlike the True T&A ads, the Match ads are really tame. Hotties in their dormrooms, yes, exciting, titilating or interesting? Not so much. I don't see this campaign helping Match much. If you're going to have video of a hottie in college, she should probably be doing something a more exciting than staring at a computer or tying her shoes. They better have some ads in the pipeline that are a lot more exciting than these if they want to take on True in the traffic wars.

After a few page loads, I finally got some True ads:

Hmm, which site is Joe America going to go check out?

Match will undoubtedly get a certain amount of traffic from the Myspace inventory. We'll have to compare their Hitwise ranking to True's over the next few months to see if this, and hopefully more creative, ads play out on millions of Myspace homepages.

The load time on Myspace is slooow tonight. My browser progress bar shows the Userplane stuff is hanging on the pageloads for minutes at a time. Probably a temporary glitch, but it's making Myspace almost unusable at the moment.

Technorati Tags: match.com, myspace, advertising, true.com

Much of my work in the dating and social networking industry involves working with startups looking for a way to leapfrog their way into a market-leading position in a particular niche. Other times it's developing new growth strategies for established sites that are looking to crack the top 10, or need help developing a strategy to stay there as SAC increases, daters continue to flock to social networking sites and [insert your companies pain point here].

After several years of working with both ends of the spectrum, it's clear the startups will continue along on limited budgets, hoping to do a land grab on a particular niche while the top 10 sites are facing an entirely different set of problems.

One thing I've found is that issues common to all sites include the following:

• Drive more traffic to your site
• Increase conversion rates
• Decrease SAC
• Competitive Overview
• Free or paid subscription tiers
• Service differentiators
• Marketing strategy
• New features (VOIP, chat, mobile, games, anonymous calling)
• Comprehensive site evaluations
• Other site-specific issues

If you are seeking insights into how to address any of the above, email me to learn how we may be able to work together.

Technorati Tags: consulting, startup

A whole slew of dating sites are interviewing or closing deals with new PR shops. Looks like in several cases the old guard and we can only hope that fresh ideas are being put on the table. You need to get into the hearts and minds of singles before you can get into their wallets. If your PR shop isn't talking about creating viral videos like Loneygirl15, or creating a blog for your dating site, instead promising the same old inane press releases and old school media tactics, politely ask them to end the pitch immediately. The days of driving site traffic via empty calorie articles from Living Arts reporters are o-v-e-r, capiche?

RateOrDate say the Lycos Dating Search Engine is gone, instead redirecting to the Lycos home page. A good idea which died on the vine due to waning corporate interest and lackluster implementation. There are a few companies preparing to launch similar sites, expect the meta-search concept to gain traction in '07.

Dearest irina68@hotmail.com, thank you for all the emails this week, why are my responses bouncing back? I need to know where to send you the money to pay off your debt so you can come visit me.

Technorati Tags: publicrelations, gorillamarketing

Last night I was tweaking my Match profile. I saw that it asked me for the town I grew up in. I don't remember that as a question before, and have no way of telling if that's a new question or not because who can keep track of these things?

Sometimes it takes re-subscribing to a dating site to make you realize most dating site users are like goldfish in a bowl. One trip around equals the industry standard three month average subscriber. After that point, they're gone, to be replaced by the next member. In fact, I just read a business plan for a new social networking site that listed reducing customer churn as the primary marketing tactic.

This is a good thing for the industry, which has a collective memory of goldfish, unlike the elephant-like memory of most consumer services. Think Enron, Exxon, Sony, etc. In the dating world your missteps are forgotten quickly, which is a clear upside to the amount of customer churn the industry generates each month.

How many upgrades, changes and revisions have the major dating sites made to their sites in the last year? What are the effects of these changes? Who are the self-described stats geeks that gets off on metrics and measuring the changes brought about by small changes in the user experience? I love the idea of playing with all the levers and seeing the results. Doing this at a high-traffic site would be fascinating. Change a font size, loose 1,00 customers. Drop subscription price by $1, make an additional $500k in revenue that week. Success can often be traced back to a color scheme, a font size or how search results are displayed.

Some sites are quite aggressive in their willingness to tweak the norm, try something new, or test a feature. Others require a panel of experts and a lengthy series of meetings to make the most minute changes. The important thing is to remember that we never really know what's going to work and what won't until we try it. In your next product development meeting, take the conversation about more radical changes a step further, hopefully you'll be pleasantly surprised at the outcome.

Benny Fluman at Zoozamen tells me that Spark Networks is building a premium service based on the Zoozamen psychological testing engine. Every Jdate members will have a free personal psychological profile which can be used during the matching process in addition to the standard fields. This is similar to how results from the Yahoo Personals Personality & Love Style Test are integrated with the search feature and displayed in people's profiles.

According to Fluman, it sounds like people can rate other potential couples, and there is a premium level of service which will cost more. Maybe someone at JDate will chime in to clarify the functionality and integration with the service.

Jlove, the new Jewish dating site created by ex- JDate executives, is touting a male-to-female ratio of 53 to 47 percent as opposed to the usual 70/30. JLove uses Thomas Technologies Personality Search feature (Thomas is a sponsor of this blog). It has been said that JLove is offering Jewish singles “everything that JDate isn't.”

JLove press releases tout the focus on catering to women but I don't see clear evidence of how they is targeting single Jewish women differently than any other Jewish dating site. JLove has a long way to go to catch up with JDate, but they certainly seem to be putting together a solid blend of features and functionality to achieve their goal of owning the Jewish dating market.

Technorati Tags: jewish+dating, zoozamen

Think Partnership Inc. has announced a new letter of intent to sell its Internet dating business to Mountains West Exploration Inc. for $21 million. More at Tampa Bay Business Journal.

If the deal closes under the stated terms, MWXI will pay $5 million in cash, a secured promissory note for $13 million and unregistered common stock of MWXI worth $3 million. The promissory note would bear a 7 percent interest rate and be payable in 12 monthly installments beginning July 1, 2007, a release said.

The aggregate purchase price would be subject to a downward adjustment of up to $6 million depending on the 2007 EBITDA performance of Cherish.

The sale includes Think Partnership's online dating subsidiary Cherish Inc. and other direct and indirect subsidiaries that comprise nearly all of the Think Consumer market segment, including Personals Plus Inc. and Vintacom Florida Inc.

The principal activities of Mountains West is to acquire, explore and develop coal bed methane in the South Central Colorado region. Makes perfect sense, right?

Think originally signed the original letter of intent in March of 2006. Changes include a reduction in the cash changing hands from $21 million up front to $5 million plus a $13 million promissory note.

More info on the Think acquisition of Vintacom in December 2005.

Technorati Tags: vintacom

Consumer Reports sends a staffer out on an online dating spree at AmericanSingles, eHarmony, Match.com, True, and Yahoo Personals.

Shout-out to sponsor Userplane. Check out their latest newsletter.

SLProfiles, enhanced profiles pulled from SLprofiles.com, displayed within SecondLife. The site accepts advertising, which is paid in Linden Dollars (in-world currency.)

Dating site reviews at Undercover Dater. More in depth than most review sites, still mostly affiliate links.

Luvoo.com starts an auction site. No, not for people.