NY TIMES — Nov 11 — A growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence. Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. Web 2.0 sites connect applications, "mash-ups" — i.e. Zillow. The Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: "I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child." Radar Networks exploits social site content. KnowItAll’s Opine works with product and review sites. Metaweb want to “build a better infrastructure for the Web” and is underwritten by Intelligence Agencies along with Cycorp. FULL ARTICLE @ NY TIMES
Mark Brooks: Fast forward fifteen years. The internet dating industry will have completely transformed. Seemingly all powerful social networks will metastasize. Smaller, leaner, renegade companies who understand the culture and tenets and emotional make-up of their target markets will build powerful, deeply rooted new brands…and do so by giving them what they want. Dates, mates, new friends and fun about town. Users will get more sophisticated and demand more immediacy, more modes of communication, more results. Singles want dates, and sex, and relationships with compatible singles. Compatibility is easier to predict around behaviors. Users don’t understand what they truly want, or they all out lie. Guys lie about wanting serious relationships and women lie about wanting casual ones. Singles ultimately will demand the semantic web deliver them online flirting and real world dates. Talking to cell phone, "Find me a date with a <race> girl who is within 30 miles of <my town> and is compatible with me for a <term> relationship." I picked up Dragon Naturally Speaking, a KRZR phone and a Sonos music system in the last couple of weeks. In fifteen years they will all be one and the same, and they’ll understand me…not just my accent, they’ll really understand me.
“Fast forward fifteen years. The internet dating industry will have completely transformed.”
Yeah!!!!!!
3 YEARS AGO
Although it is from NOV 2003, there is an interesting PPT presentation about how the U.S. MARKET OPPORTUNITY REMAINS ENORMOUS. (page 6)
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/11/111999/presentations/IAC_Personals.pdf
NOW
the U.S. MARKET OPPORTUNITY REMAINS ENORMOUS
http://www.iac.com/investors.html
http://www.iac.com/index/news/press/IAC/press_release_detail.htm?id=7945
Personals, Paid Subscribers: 1,317,700
There are more than 900 “Online Dating & Social Networking Sites” at the United States and Canada, but top 10 Online Dating sites have 80%/85% of actual market. If you add net paid subscribers of all U.S. dating sites, perhaps the total is less than 5 million!!!
What dating sites are doing / will do to court the other U.S. 80 million singles not seriously dating online? They need to offer GREAT INNOVATIONS, but …. they will definitively come from new discoveries on Theories of Romantic Relationships Development.
Kindest Regards,
Fernando Ardenghi.
Buenos Aires.
Argentina.
ardenghifer@gmail.com
Thank you Mark.
Seems like you’re telling the real story of our future in Online Dating Industry!
You have touched a problem of understanding and that’s really essential. Cause even nowadays, understanding the needs leads to success. And everyone dreams about being understood by the machines without special efforts. But when this time comes what will we do with our real life? How will we learn to communicate outside the Internet? Will we really need Dating for finding singles if they won’t be able to undertsand us?)
This web 3.0 stuff is fascinating – great post!! I think you’re spot on with the future having powerful leaders who understand their audiences.
The article implies that a web 3.0 website will answer a user’s very specific question about a place to ski under $3000 that takes kids (for example). The secret to profitting and growing will not be the AI that answers these specific questions correctly, because users will resist learning how to ask the right questions ultimately rendering those engines visit-less. I think the real money lies in the “cataloging and profiling” database. I guess they are mostly the same solution, but implementation will require a profiling database to prevent duplicate efforts in finding out details about someone.
I am currently working on a design to categorize people according to their personal development in their search for Love. A guy who’s never been on two dates in the same year has no use for 90% of the sites that show up when he searches for “dating site” because he is too scared to ask out any of those girls. So why should the engines show him that. His needs are unique, and like you said, he may not know what to ask for.
The company that stores that profiling information will be the ultimate retailer by providing black box advertising based on a detailed profile that the advertiser maintains in a master database (think: Plaxo-style) showing every aspect of an individual’s tastes and personality. All materials outside of this user’s tastes will vanish into a “Unfiltered” option that the user can turn on at anytime.
The winner is that game is the one who earns people’s trust enough to be able to keep their intimate details on file and with their permission, in the spirit of helping them search better.