Month: January 2005

On dates more than a few of the handsome, rugged, athletic types she thought she had been corresponding with looked more like George Costanza than George Clooney. Some of those “single” guys turned out to have wives. Feeling weary and, she said, “jerked around,” Gold let her paid subscription to Match.com expire, and she has turned to real-life singles mixers for professionals. “It’s a lot of effort, and it’s really no different from the people you meet in the offline world,” she said. “I’m becoming disenchanted. I’ve got people contacting me from North Carolina and New Mexico, and that’s not going to work.”

Mark Brooks: Where else can you go to fast search through over one million eligibles? Yes, online dating is a lot of work…but if your goal is to hook-up for the long haul, it’s the most important decision you’ll ever make so it’s worth investing in a quality online dating service to help narrow the field in a hurry. btw…One of the reasons online dating is settling down from three figure growth rates is because of massive amounts of competition for online advertising. The industry is still growing by $100’s of millions of dollars a year.

INTERNET RETAILER — Buy.com sees social networking as a springboard to the future of retail e-commerce; acquired metails.com last fall and has since renamed it Yub.com. “Social networking is the next wave of the Internet,” asserts Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO, which expects to boost its number of subscribers with a social networking feature it launched late November. Friendster (13 million members) just sells commercial advertising space so far. eBay’s system of letting buyers and sellers rate each other has for years served as a form of social networking. For now, Yub.com appears to be the only site offering to pay commissions to members whose product referrals lead to purchases. INTERNET RETAILER

Mark Brooks: Affiliate programs to the power ten. But will the ideavirus spread when there’s an obvious commercial agenda. Yub pays 1% to both buyer and seller. Add a little more weight to the percentages and everyone will become an MLM based affiliate. Shhh, don’t tell Amway.