Month: October 2006

Social Network LiveJournal Offers Internet Telephony

Posted on October 19, 2006

SipINTERNET WEEK — Oct 19 — LiveJournal (10 million users) on Tuesday rolled out Internet telephony and instant messaging services from SIPphone as a free download. The Gizmo Project for provides PC-to-PC calls, as well as calls to landline and mobile phones.

The full article was originally published at Internet Week, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Internet dating companies must consider telephony options now. The time is ripe.  Technology is available. Users are sophisticated enough to handle it. Users want connections. Real world connections. Women like to gage a guy by the sound of his voice and what he has to say. Let's give the ladies what they want. Voice connections before the coffee date.

Fastest Growing Sites by Country

Posted on October 19, 2006

Logo_plentyoffish_6PARADIGM SHIFT BLOG — Oct 19 — PlentyofFish growth. Right now Alexa Radar is showing the top fastest moving sites and a break down of sites traffic per Country.

The full article was originally published at Paradigm Shift, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: Very cool. The graph shows PlentyofFish as the 2nd fastest growing site in Canada.  Myspace is the 2nd fastest growing site in the USA. Love21cn.com shows up as the fastest growing site in China.

Dating Websites Can Miss Criminals

Posted on October 19, 2006

True_1_6KUTV — Oct 18 — TRUE promises safer relationships through background checks but admits that sex offenders and convicted felons can still make their way into the site. Convicted child molester and registered sex offendor, Robert Wells, registered on the site. “If we find [a member has] a felony conviction, we're going to turn [them] in for wire fraud,” said CEO Herb Vest. TRUE uses a criminal screening company called "Rapsheets," which has  ~94% of U.S. felony convictions,” said Vest.
He says Wells lives in a country that does not provide criminal data to certain companies. A quick search on the government-funded national sex offender registry – and we found Robert Wells. Vest says the sex offender registry isn't commercially feasible to use. Rapsheets performs thousands of background checks instantaneously. “There's no database, there's nothing I could do to possibly get all of the convicted felons,” said Vest. TRUE will debut a new, more thorough data provider early next year which should nab 96% of criminals.

Mark Brooks: TRUE is doing the best it can with the services currently available. If other major dating sites had offered background checks perhaps the rate of improvement would have been faster.  Rapsheets offers affordable, value background checks. They're not 100%, but they're better than nothing. Other, more thorough, services exist but are cost prohibitive. The arguments from other sites against bg checks goes as follows. We don't offer bg checks because: 1. They're way short of being foolproof (and fairly pricey), 2. Most felony charges are talked down to misdemeanors and misdemeanors are way more difficult to search for, 3. Users can lie about their identity which renders the background checks useless. TRUE states on their home page "If you are a convicted criminal, be aware that you could be guilty of fraud and subject to civil and criminal penalties."  That's more compelling.  That's where the teeth are in TRUE safety offerings.

fyi, TRUE's business development team made their background checking system available to other dating sites several months ago. Noone has taken them up on it yet. Enabling their system on other dating sites would undermine their differentiation but proves they are more committed to the cause of safety than they are given credit for. Checks would be ~$5 each using the Rapsheet system.

Internet User Admits ‘web-rage’

Posted on October 18, 2006

WebrageBBC NEWS — Oct 17 — An internet user has been found guilty of what police said was Britain's first "web-rage" attack. The pair met in an internet chatroom called Islam 10 (Yahoo). Both had an interest in the Muslim faith but exchanges soured after Gibbons accused Mr Jones of spreading rumours about him. Gibbons traced Jones to his home using personal details about himself that he had put online. A fight broke out. Essex Police said the case demonstrates the importance of protecting one's identity on the internet.

The full article was originally published at BBC News, but is no longer available.

Mark Brooks: TRUE has been raising awareness of the risks associated with internet dating. MySpace has been in the news constantly on the subject. The internet is still safer than meeting people randomly in the real world. Users should, however, not share contact information such as address and telephone numbers. I'm working on Vumber and we'll release a simple 'throw away number' telephone service for singles at the internet dating convention in January. 

New Dating Reality Television Show From Fox

Posted on October 18, 2006

Sm_mynetworktvCORANTE — Oct 17 — My Dating Place, a local half-hour strip, will be tested on Fox-owned MyNetworkTV affiliate KUTP Phoenix starting late this year or early 2007. Would-be daters can apply on the station's Website.

The full article was originally published at Corante, but is no longer available.

Teen Using MySpace to Lure Bands to L.A.

Posted on October 18, 2006

Myspace_19BBSPOT — Oct 18 — A thirteen-year-old girl posing as a record executive on MySpace has lured several bands to Los Angeles with promises of a record contract.  One record executive said, "I’m not surprised. Most of these bands are as dumb as dirt." FULL ARTICLE @ BBSPOT

News Sources

Posted on October 18, 2006

GooglereaderOPW — Oct 18 — Every morning I personally review all of the following 80 blogs (thank you Google Reader) for the top internet dating and social networking stories. The relevant core intelligence from Yahoo News and these blogs is then added to Online Personals Watch, Mobile Dating Watch and Frequent Flirters for you to digest. Sign up for the daily emails if you really want to stay on top of the online personals industry.

Affiliate Blog, Affiliate Blog by Shawn Collins, Affiliate Blog UK, Affiliate Classroom Blog, Affiliate Summit Blog, Alex Schultz: APIs, Andy Beal's Marketing Pilgrim, apophenia, BGSL, Clicks2Customers, CPAEmpire.com Blog, Dating Dames, digg, Ensight, eWhisper.net, Fast Company Now, Find-a-Sweetheart Blog, Geekfishing Blog, GigaOM, Google Blogoscoped, Goyami, how to get the guy, Ideas are Worthless Unless Acted Upon, Inside AdWords, Internet Dating Dirt, Janus Friis, JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising, John Battelle's Searchblog, kottke.org, Many-to-Many, MarketingVOX, Mathew Ingram, Matt Cutts: Gadgets Google and SEO,  Media Buyer Planner, /Message, Micro Persuasion, MobileCrunch, Netimperative Marketing, Netimperative Media, Netimperative Mobile, Netimperative News and Analysis, Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, Online Dating Insider, Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed, People Search News, PPC Expert & SEO Strategist Blog by Gordon Choi, Read/WriteWeb, Redeye VC, Release1.0, ReveNews, Ross Mayfield's Weblog, SCI FI Tech, Scobleizer, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Watch Blog, SearchQuant, SearchViews, SEO by the SEA, Sifry's Alerts, Signal vs. Noise, SiliconBeat, Smart Mobs, Startup Review, Super Affiliate Marketing Blog, TechCrunch, Techmeme, The Blogging Times, The Dating Weblog, The Internet Dating Guide, The Jeff Pulver Blog, The Paradigm Shift, The Social Networking Weblog, The Social Software Weblog, the vc in me…., Thought Flickr's, Valleywag, VentureBlog, Vinny Lingham's Blog, Web Publishing Blog, Website Publisher Blog

There seems to be at least twenty times more stories on social networking than internet dating these days.  Should I break out social networking onto a different blog, or are you happy combining the news in one place, on OPW? – Mark Brooks

PlentyofFish on Canadian News TV

Posted on October 18, 2006

Logo_plentyoffish_5
GLOBAL NATIONAL — Oct 18 — Last year 12% of newlyweds in
the U.S. met
through the Internet. So we can assume a
similar number of Canadians did. Clearly
there are plenty of fish available out there and tonight we’re profiling one of
the biggest nets that catches them. She
was HorseLady3, a small town B.C. girl. He was HappyDaddy, a Vancouver
chef whose search for love took him on the Internet. "I needed an escape because the separation
from my marriage was kind of hard." It
wasn’t long before the two found each other. "We hit it off and we haven’t looked back since." Markus Frind is the Vancouver
web guru who just happens to be one of the world’s biggest matchmakers. His site, Plentyoffish.com brought together
HorseLady3 and HappyDaddy and thousands of other couples and he runs it all
from his tiny Vancouver
office. "I am the largest website run
by one person. I’m doing about 600
million pages a month." His website
is part of a new wave of companies making money on content generated not by them, but by users. The biggest example is YouTube, the online
video site that Google recently bought for $1.65 billion. Like YouTube, Frind’s site is free to use and is bringing in a heap of cash. [Google
Adsense] ads make him more then $10,000 a day. "The tellers always look at me real funny. They’re like are you some kind of
criminal? Why do you come in with a
$900,000 check? I suppose if I went
paid, this site could make hundreds of millions but it just wouldn’t be fun
anymore and I would have to hire people and I don’t know, I just like what I’m
doing right now."  FULL VIDEO @ GLOBAL NATIONAL (via YOU TUBE)


Mark Brooks: This story gives some insight on Markus. Every American
dreams of making big bucks working on their own terms, from home.
Markus is the poster boy for the internet fringe of one-man-band
success stories. This fringe is growing but it’s a rarity to see them
pop their heads up. He’s ranked #1 in Canada on Alexa, and #6 in the
Hitwise USA rankings of internet dating sites. Markus said in this
interview, "
I am the largest website run
by one person." That’s a lot of mental ownership. He’s gunning to be
the top internet dating site in the U.S.A. Your comments please.