PR WEB — Aug 8 — Cheekymonkeydating allows users to publish personal contact details and incorporates Skype buttons. It's geared towards allowing people to contact each other directly. "I view the site more as a directory of people seeking dates than a traditional dating site," founder, David Thomas, commented. "Most online dating agencies get people to write their profiles which they will publish for free, then they charge them the earth for a subscription that allows them to send mail. Often the money will be wasted, because many of the people receiving the messages will not have paid a subscription fee, and therefore won't be able to reply." FULL ARTICLE @ PR WEB
Mark Brooks: Internet dating sites need to capture the entire communications continuum. Email is old hat. Instant Messaging is where most dating site users are at now. But they really want to talk to each other, and see each other. Voice and video. How can internet dating sites capture the full communicatios spectrum? Is it viable, really? Your comments please…
We offered the ability of our users to share email, phone, IM, and any other username they saw applicable since we opened our doors. Our users can specify what information they would like to be public and what information they would like to share on a case by case basis. With Collaboradate 1.0 skype buttons will be intigrated, along with many other great new features. We want our users to be free to contact other users any way they see fit. Restrictions and confinement are what drive people away.
On a lighter note, this entire blog post was written with the new voice recognition software built into the windows vista preview release. Quite impressive, especially for something made by Microsoft.
Mark, that was a great post. It certainly is viable to allow users to communicate via voice and video, which is one of the design ideas that we had for Cheeky Monkey Dating. Each profile can have active Skype buttons, giving people the chance to communicate by instant messaging, voice or video through Skype, and profile owner can give these details to the public, to members of the service, or to nobody, as they see fit.
I believe this way will become the norm in the future for online dating sites, and I am excited to be one of the pioneers of this approach. It’s far easier to communicate if you can hear the voice of the person at the other end, and easier still if you can see them and their body language.
We also allow members to add any form of personal contact details in their description, although we suggest that they steer clear of adding their phone number and physical address.
We give the profiles of our members greater exposure on the web by means of our RSS feeds, which is quite unusual for a dating site.
It IS viable for dating sites to capture the whole communications spectrum, from private messaging through voice to video and IM. Many dating sites have tried it but the public doesn’t care about it as much as the industry thinks they should.
With webcams people are driven away because opening a webcam session is all too often seen as an invitation to induldge in cybersex and this drives genuine daters away in droves.
Voice messaging and anoymous calling is really handy but fiddly and badly integrated in most dating sites.
IM is popular amongst daters but it’s much more useful between close friends and colleagues, ie, those you already have a close relationship with, because of its intimate and immediate nature. When you meet strangers online you are not intimate with them and going straight for the IM is too much, too soon in many cases.
In short all synchronous forms of communcication are too intimate and in-your-face to be useful for forming relationships with total strangers, and therefore private messaging and email, which are asynchronous forms of communcation, are the ideal tools for many daters.
Gordon (playing devil’s advocate).
Dating online is similar in so many ways except feeling awkward because instead of others checking you out you get the chance to check them out first. You don’t have to create a conversation if you don’t want to. It feels a lot like a party, except you call the shots, make your own list and choose who gets to be invited to your party.