Category: Outlets – Fast Company

FAST COMPANY – Jan 27 - Dr. Pepper Schwartz is the author of The Love Test, The Great Sex Weekend, Everything You Know About Love and Sex is Wrong, and more. She's a professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle who mugs on behalf of PerfectMatch.com, where she co-developed The Duet® Total Compatibility System. On the final day of the iDate conference, Schwartz told the audience her system is based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Joining her was Dr. Eli Finkel who staked out his own territory as industry-scold, denouncing eHarmony. eHarmony has refused to reveal its algorithm, Finkel said, and therefore the company should not advertise a scientific approach to matching until it can show, publicly, that its system works according to the standards of scientific rigor. Today it's not the professor-backed dating sites but the ones run by math geeks that seem to be on top. Sam Yagan, a cofounder of OkCupid.com (sold to Match.com for $90M), responded to Drs. Finkel and Schwartz with an occasional eye roll. He dispatched a very brief, slide-assisted explanation of OkCupid's matching process. The users are not required to answer any questions. But the site is premised on the idea that the more questions users answer, the better OkCupid works for them. For each question, users provide three answers: (1) their own answer, (2) the answers they are willing to accept from a match, and (3) the level of importance they attache to the question. The innovation of OkCupid lies in its pliability.