VENTURE BEAT – Nov 21 – It seems others can still get inside users account through links in OKCupid emails despite reports about the security issue earlier this year. It’s through a feature called “login instantly.” The link is set up with an authentication token that tells the website, “It’s okay, this person’s legit, let ‘em in,” assuming you’re who you say you are because you’re accessing the site through your email. That doesn’t work when someone else has their hands on the email, or just the link.
Category: OkCupid
Group Dating Is On The Rise
NY TIMES – Nov 10 – “Traditional online dating takes too much time,” said Lauren Kay, 24, a founder of the Dating Ring, a group dating company that started last spring. She requires singles to meet with an in-house matchmaker, before being set up in groups of three single men and women ($20 a date). "Group dating is simply a version of general night life, said Abel Acuña, a founder of Martini, a group-dating service in New York, Paris, London and Seoul, South Korea. These services make fewer claims about arranging romance, promising only the low-stress opportunity of hanging out. Grouper bills itself as a social club. “We are more excited about groups that are 12 and higher,” said Sam Yagan, founder of OKCupid.com and CEO of Match.com.
by Marisa Meltzer
See full article at NY Times
Sam Yagan Defends OKCupid’d Body Type Filters
TODAY – Oct 4 – OKCupid lets users filter out people by body type for a fee (5 – $10). The site has offered this tool for several months but only recently began to make it more prominent, said Sam Yagan. "The body-type filter is an extension of what happens in the real world," said Yagan. eHarmony has no plans to offer a similar screening tool. Physical attraction does play a role in dating, but so does education level, religion, and their “outlook on happiness,” said Arvind Mishra, the site’s VP of product management.
by Eun Kyung Kim
See full article at Today
What Data OKCupid Shares About Its Users
NPR – Oct 1 – Ashkan Soltani, a digital privacy specialist, set up a fake account at OkCupid.com to demonstrate how private companies are tracking what people are doing online. OKCupid's questionnaire asks him for a wide range of information, including drug use. While at OKCupid, he launches two softwares — Collusion and MITM Proxy. The Collusion program reveals that ~50 companies are tracking Soltani's computer as he visits OKCupid. Some are advertising firms, while others collect information and then sell it to ad firms or industry research companies. MITM Proxy shows information that those companies are receiving from OKCupid. Nothing unusual. Websites commonly allow other companies to monitor what users are doing on their sites but at least one company, Lotame, learned that Soltani uses drugs "often."
OKCupid.com Lets Users Pay To Filter Out Ugly People
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK – Oct 2 – OkCupid.com lets online daters pay $4.95 to hide anyone who classes themselves 'curvy', 'skinny', 'thin', 'jacked' or 'used up' among other body types. The site also allows its 'A-list members' ($4.49 and $9.95 monthly fee) to filter people by both looks and figure.
by Bianca London
See full article at DailyMail.co.uk
Sam Yagan: The Nerd King Of Online Dating
FORTUNE – Sep 25 – Sam Yagan launched OkCupid in 2004 with friends. Before OkCupid, they started SparkNotes, an online alternative to CliffsNotes study guides, in 1999. It sold to iTurf, for $30M. After that he joined his friend Jed McCaleb to launch eDonkey, a P2P file-sharing service that they scaled fast but shut down after pressure from record labels. Only a year and a half after buying OkCupid for ~$90M, IAC made Yagan CEO of its entire Match division. That entire segment contributed $713M of IAC's 2012 revenue of $2.8 billion. Yagan gets emails on a weekly basis from people launching a dating site. He actually roots for new online dating competitors to launch, because he is the only buyer. Match buys so much that the list of significant e-dating competitors is short: eHarmony, Spark Networks, PlentyOfFish, HowAboutWe and Zoosk (rumored to be going public this year).
by Daniel Roberts
The full article was originally published at CNN Fortune, but is no longer available.
OKCupid’s Security Flaw
BUSINESS INSIDER – Aug 20 – OkCupid uses an instant login feature. Whenever the site sends an email, links inside that email contain a unique identifier (called a token) that, upon clicking, will log users into their OKCupid account without a password. The trouble presents itself when people begin forwarding these emails or otherwise distributing these custom links.
by Dylan Love
See full article at Business Insider
Mark Brooks: Ease of access vs security. Given the privacy concerns of
many iDating users, the decision to improve conversion factors over
protecting privacy is interesting. You can be sure that this was
tested, and the conclusion drawn that making the email based logins was
worthwhile the odd user screw-up. What's your thoughts? Which way
would you sway with your dating site?
OKCupid’s OKTrends To Start Up Again
DIGIDAY – Aug 20 – In the spring of 2011, OkTrends was one of the hottest blogs on the web. From August 2010 to April 2011, OkTrends posts averaged 32,5K Facebook likes and 4K tweets. And then, all of a sudden, they stopped. The blog went dormant “for a couple of reasons,” said Rudder, who still works full-time at OkCupid. “I was the person who wrote all the posts and there was just other stuff I had to do here. I’m writing a book, which is kind of like a superset of all the stuff I did on OkTrends,” he explained. Rudder’s forthcoming book, “Dataclysm,” is due to its publisher, Crown Publishing, in December for a fall 2014 release. Rudder plans to rekindle OkTrends this March.
by Joe Lazauskas
See full article at DigiDay
Mark Brooks: Woohoo! At last! Other sites have toyed with pushing interesting data, but then they don't have a Harvard genius dedicated to spending a week on each post. Truly fascinating data, beautifully interpreted is hard to come by.
Men Prefer Women Who Cheat
Socialbots Can Flirt And Tweet
NY TIMES – Aug 13 – From the earliest days of the Internet, robotic programs, or bots, have been trying to pass themselves off as human. Chatbots greet users when they enter an online chat room, spambots churn out e-mails advertising miracle stocks and unattended bank accounts in Nigeria. Bimbots deploy photos of gorgeous women to hawk work-from-home job ploys and illegal pharmaceuticals. Now come socialbots, programmed to tweet and retweet. This new breed of bots is being designed to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500M. Some researchers estimate that ~35% of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. Within two years, ~10 % of activity occurring on social networks will be masquerading bots, according to technology researchers. Dating sites provide especially fertile ground for socialbots. Christian Rudder, a co-founder and GM of OkCupid, said that when his site recently bought and redesigned a smaller site, they witnessed not just a sharp decline in bots, but also a sudden 15% drop in use of the new site by real people. This decrease in traffic occurred because the flirtatious messages and automated “likes” that bots had been posting to members’ pages had imbued the former site with a false sense of intimacy and activity. Mr. Rudder and his programmers are seeking to design their own bots that will flirt with invader bots, courting them into a special room, “a purgatory of sorts,” to talk to one another rather than fooling the humans.
by Ian Urbina
See full article at NY Times
This post also appears on SocialNetworkingWatch.