CNET NEWS — Dec 2 — In Vietnam there are no dating services and young people still mostly meet the traditional way–through
friends, school, family and work. Those who do meet online most
often become friends through blogging, forums, or online social
activities. Unlike in the States, where couples tend to move in
together, people in Vietnam generally only live together once married.
In between, they rely on cell phones and the Internet to stay close. FULL ARTICLE @ CNET NEWS
Category: Outlets – CNet News
Oregon Trail Facebook App To Be Replaced With Speeddate.com
CNET NEWS — Oct 24 — SpeedDate.com, the purveyor of the Web video-based online dating service snatched up the rights to the Oregon Trail Facebook application, which will soon be replaced with the service's existing speed-dating application. The practice of changing an application's functionality and namesake is fair and legal according to Facebook's platform application guidelines and terms of service. Developers are free to make these drastic changes to their applications as long as they stay within Facebook's relatively loose rules.
The full article was originally published at CNet News, but is no longer available.
Personal Ads + Google Maps = HookupMaps
CNET NEWS — Oct 22 — A mix of Google Maps and Craigslist classifieds has resulted in HookupMaps, a service that shows you exactly where the people wanting to "hook up" in your city are. For instance, in San Francisco, there are currently 518 people seeking people. It will also tell you the age and gender of each poster.
The full article was originally published at CNet News, but is no longer available.
Alternate Dating Sites
CNET NEWS — Feb 18 — Worldwide there are more then 1400 internet dating sites. Given the market saturation online dating consultant Mark Brooks says newer sites are forced to innovate both in concept and technology. Want your avatar to meet mine? Try out OmniDate.com or let's find out if our voices are compatible. Log onto LoveDetect.com. Another one of those alternate dating sites is CrazyBlindDate.com. Prior to the date you only get to see a pixilated photo of your match and you can only communicate by texting through the site's cupid line. Unlike more established dating sites, webcam sites like SpeedDate.com, Woome.com and Camlink.com require very little personal information to get started. As long as people are out there looking for love there will be a website to cater to their needs, desires, fantasies and fetishes.
Dating Site Visits Up, Pre-Valentine’s Day
CNET NEWS — Feb 14 — Visits to dating sites were up 26% in the week ending February 9 in comparison with the equivalent week in 2007, according to Hitwise. At the top of the rankings was SinglesNet.com, followed by PlentyOfFish.com. Rounding out the top five were eHarmony, True, and Yahoo Personals.
The full article was originally published at CNet News, but is no longer available.
MySpace Thinking of Opening APIs
The full article was originally published at CNet, but is no longer available.
Turning Social Network Traffic Into Dollars
CNET NEWS — Oct 18 — New technologies are on the horizon now to help social networks appeal to discerning advertisers. RelevanceNow, for example, is an Australian start-up with a technology it calls "social intelligence," an analytics tool that can size up members of a community via their psychographics, which classify attitudes, values, likes and dislikes. A social network could segment groups of people based on details they've divulged in their profiles. Paul Martino, the founding CTO of Tribe.net left to found a new ad-targeting company, Aggregate Knowledge, in 2005. Aggregate has developed algorithms to determine what are called "affinity clusters" of people and, based on the personality profiles of those people, targets ads.
The full article was originally published at CNet, but is no longer available.
Facebook’s For Everyone
CNET NEWS — Sep 27 — As the site considers a hefty buyout by Yahoo and eyes new competitors in the college space, this week it joins the likes of Friendster and MySpace in losing the exclusivity that fed its popularity.
The full article was originally published at CNet News, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: I'm on Facebook now. Feel free to link up. Facebook has surely been eyeing MySpace's userbase for a long while. This is the next logical (short term sell the company) step for them. They need to continue showing exponential growth rates for the buyout. Makes sense, but undermines their integrity/focus/branding. They have to stay ahead technologically now, or they WILL lose their student base to other sites as they seek out the next great underground superhip next generation social network. Students will use more than one network, and might eventually shift their loyalty and focus if a site opens up and is significantly technologically ahead of Facebook.
God’s MySpace: MyChurch.org
CNET NEWS — Sep 1 — Unlike the beautiful and highly interactive Faces.com social network, MyChurch is more like Facebook — it lets you go deep into a particular community, rather than broadcasting yourself to the world. Churches can pay extra for additional bandwidth, storage, and services. Users can invite all their MySpace contacts with one click, co-founder Joe Suh told me. What about MyMosque or MySynagogue? Suh has no immediate plans to reach out to other religions, but there are companies, like Simpatico Networks, that build social networks for different religious groups. PeopleAggregator lets any group set up its own online community. Also Alstrasoft, Small World Labs, SocialPlatform, and Sparta Social Networks.
The full article was originally published at CNet News, but is no longer available.
Cyworld Launches in U.S.
CNET NEWS.COM — Aug 11 — Cyworld, a South Korean social networking site, kicked off a beta in the U.S. on July 27. ~18 million people in South Korea (~30%) have accounts with Cyworld, according to Cyworld. ~80% of 20 to 29 year olds in S.Korea visit daily. The service, which started in 1999, has since expanded into China (2 million users), Japan and Taiwan. Revenue is from advertisers, from hosting corporate-sponsored pages and also from selling background screens, charms and other graphics to for users to decorate their sites. The decorative services account for $300,000 a day in revenue / US $100 million a year. MySpace is expected to make $180 million this year, according to eMarketer. But MySpace has a base of 100 million members, five times as many as Cyworld. Cyworld has avoided some of the predator problems that hit MySpace by having users give their national ID number (like SS#). However, it won't ask for Social Security numbers in the U.S.
The full article was originally published at News.com, but is no longer available.