Category: Outlets – Computerworld
eHarmony Won’t Settle Down With Just One Business Intelligence Tool
COMPUTERWORLD – Nov 8 - The system that powers eHarmony's matchmaking operation relies on four products: Oracle Corp.'s database, the open-source MySQL database, an open-source data-crunching app called Hadoop, and Netezza Corp. data warehousing appliances. Joseph Essas is VP of engineering and operations at eHarmony. 236 of its 20M members get married every day, the site claims. That's just one of "hundreds of metrics" that we "deeply care about," Essas said. eHarmony uses Oracle's database software to do much of the initial matching. But for hard-core data processing, the company relies on a speedy 50-node Hadoop cluster. Speed is important, because eHarmony updates the scores of its relationship matches whenever new members sign up, as well as when existing members update their profiles.
Profile Pictures on Social Networks ‘Are a Privacy Risk’
COMPUTER WORLD – It's becoming easier for strangers to identify people and infer detailed information about them from their publicly available images on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Alessandro Acquisti, associate professor of IT and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College, used a facial recognition tool called Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition (PittPatt) developed at CMU to see whether he could find matches between the dating site images and the Facebook profile pictures. ~5,800 dating site members also had Facebook profiles. Of these, more ~4,900 were uniquely identified. The numbers are significant because a previous CMU survey showed that 90% of Facebook members use their real name on their profiles.
The Tech Behind eHarmony
COMPUTER WORLD – Sep 16 – To match people, eHarmony relies on four database and data warehousing products which include Oracle Database, the open-source MySQL database, open-source data-crunching app, Hadoop, and data warehousing appliances from Netezza. Assigning matches is a complex mathematical problem called "graph partitioning," said Joseph Essas, VP of engineering and operations. Hadoop is speedy, says Essas. "What used to take hours now with Hadoop takes just 30 minutes," he said. eHarmony also uses Hadoop to do real-time analysis of the effectiveness of its TV ads.
The full article was originally published at Computerworld, but is no longer available.
WhiteLabelDating.com Helps Entrepreneurs Get Started
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — The biggest barrier to entry in the online dating business is "inventory". It's a chicken and egg problem – and one reason why newcomers need at least $10m to start their own online dating business and compete against the big guns today, according to Mark Brooks, editor of onlinepersonalswatch.com. Prospective online dating entrepreneurs can buy a plug-and-play online dating site, complete with inventory, through WhiteLabelDating.com, a hosted service provider. "You put your brand onto it, and you market it. We do everything else," says Ross Williams, CEO of the UK-based company, which claims to host 2,500 participating sites and 1m registered users worldwide.
The full article was originally published at Computerworld, but is no longer available.
Online Dating: It’s Bigger Than Porn
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — Online dating is the third largest revenue producer out of all paid content sites, behind digital music and online gaming, according to Forrester Research. Revenues for the industry are expected to grow by 10% through 2013. That's the third fastest category, behind only filmed entertainment and digital music.Top Online Paid Content Sites in 2008 by Category ($ in millions)
Digital music $1,732
Video games $1,866
Dating $957
The full article was originally published at Computerworld, but is no longer available.
Online Dating: Blocking The Bad Guys
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — iovation's ReputationManager service, which is also used by financial services, social networking and online gaming sites, collects data on 32 categories of unwelcome activities ranging from fraud to spam to chat abuse. The system then associate those behaviors with the specific computer used by creating a "device print." In this way, scammers who are detected can't just log in again under a new identity. Information on suspect devices is shared with all subscribers so that a scammer who attacks one site can be blocked from accessing another. The company claims to have stopped more than 730,000 account creations and fraudulent activities last year.
The full article was originally published at Computerworld, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: iovation (an Intel backed company) is helping the internet dating industry to work together to beat scammers and those that would be abusive towards our communities. (Full Disclosure: iovation is a client of Courtland Brooks)
Avatars Tackle The First Date For You
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — OmniDate is working on a new service that features photo-realistic avatars, online characters that look like you. Users submit a photo, which the service renders as an animated online character. Your avatar can then go on a virtual date in a variety of settings, such as a restaurant or a bar. "How do you go from reading a profile to interacting with a person online and eventually in person?" asks CEO Igo Kotlyar. "Our goal is to bridge that gap."
The full article was originally published at Computerworld, but is no longer available.
Mark Brooks: Avatars are nice, but the real killer app is making the avatars look like the users buy layering a photo onto the avatars. OmniDate has this in the works. That's when I think OmniDate will take off. Its next gen IM, basically. (Full Disclosure: OmniDate has been a client of Courtland Brooks in the past)
Online Dating: The Technology Behind The Attraction
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — We peek under the covers at online dating sites. To succeed, a site needs to do the following:
- Offer excellent response times. Try to give users at least some matches as soon as they've created an account.
Online personals services are glorified search engines. eHarmony, PerfectMatch and Chemistry.com ask a few dozen to several hundred questions and assemble a personality profile and a list of matches. Plentyoffish.com's keeps it simple and uses a short questionnaire. CEO Markus Frind says he doesn't promote it and he's disdainful of the complex matching algorithms offered by competitors.
2. Convert at least 10% of visitors who register into paying customers — preferably more.
eHarmony pulls information from its Oracle database into high-performance Netezza data warehouse appliances that slice and dice users into behavioral and demographic "buckets." "Because we know more about them, we can target them much better," says Joseph Essas, VP of Technology.
3. Deliver an acceptable range of probable matches and offer a variety of ways to pursue those prospects.
Video chat is perhaps the most controversial communication method offered, if only because video sessions often take a "sexual tilt," especially with men, and that drives away the women, says Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch. The most innovative communication method is virtual dates in a 3-D world. OmniDate, offers an avatar-based virtual dating system.
4. Weeding out cheats, scammers and married guys.
"10% of sign-ups a day are people trying to scam someone — or rude, obnoxious people, or spammers," Frind says. He removes ~2,000 suspicious users from the system daily. eHarmony has contracted with Iovation, which offers ReputationManager, a service that gathers information on individuals' illicit activity from online dating and other sites and makes it available to subscribers.
Your Profile’s Long, Scary Shelf Life
COMPUTERWORLD — Feb 13 — Dating services don't delete your data. "We have an archiving strategy, but we don't delete," says Joseph Essas, eHarmony's VP technology. Users who return later don't have to fill out the 400-question profile again. TRUE retains the data indefinitely. But PlentyofFish deletes records after six months to a year of inactivity. Though rare, legal actions have been filed in cases ranging from date rape to sexual harassment. Ross Williams, CEO at White Label Dating, says the prospect of offering highly targeted advertising based on demographic, behavioral, psychological and profile data is attractive. "If I have a hair product for men, I don't think there are any places online other than online dating where you can get that [demographic data]." That type of information, Williams says, gives online dating sites a unique competitive opportunity, if they're willing to exploit it.
Mark Brooks, editor of Online Personals Watch, sees highly targeted marketing as inevitable. He says traditional "interruption marketing" — rollovers, pop-ups and so forth — hasn't worked well on Internet dating sites because users don't pay attention to the ads and thinks ad-supported sites such as PlentyofFish should leverage profiles to target users with contextual offers that would be of most interest to them. "Advertising is an annoyance. The only way it will work [well] is through the power of the friendly referral," he says. But for now, PlentyofFish's Frind says the site's current advertising model, which lets advertisers target users based on basic demographic information, is working just fine, with a higher click-through rate than social networking sites and $10 million in ad revenue last year.
Mark Brooks: Advertising that is highly targeted, timely and relevant is a service to your users. iDating sites have the richest profile info on the net. Eventually we'll make use of this data to serve our users more effectively by 'recommending' interesting lifestyle products to them. (Full Disclosure: POF and White Label Dating are current clients of Courtland Brooks)
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