TECH CRUNCH – Jan 25 – Men and women experience online dating very differently. Men typically send out hundreds of emails hoping someone will respond. Women can receive hundreds of emails a week, but respond to less than 2%. Most dating profiles are static and lack social network updates. For most social discovery startups, there is a significant cold-start problem. Few startups are funded well enough to afford the marketing required to achieve scale. No social dating site has gained meaningful traction: theComplete.me (10K), Yoke (10K), Circl.es (1K), LikeBright (1K), thedatable (200), and atthepool.com have struggled. With Graph Search, can Facebook reinvent dating, drive down the associated stigma? Just because someone’s profile indicates they are single does not mean they are ready for dating. On Facebook, receiving messages from strangers feels creepy. Facebook’s profiles are shallow. The real question may be how important is the dating market to Facebook? It will be a challenge to run so many vertical solutions: dating, recruiting, ratings, reviews, etc. Facebook can easily leverage their massive social graph to enable meaningful friend-of-friend introductions. They can create very detailed, self-updating profiles by displaying and structuring data from Pinterest, Spotify, Pandora, Yelp, Netflix, Amazon, ESPN, GoodReads and more. They can dominate real-time communication: chat, check-ins, poke, texting and Skype video chat.
Category: Yoke
Mobile Dating Apps Grow In Popularity
WASHINGTON POST – Aug 19 – Americans now use dating apps more than online dating sites, according to a 2011 report by Flurry Analytics. Globally, the mobile dating market is expected to be worth $2.3 billion by 2016, up from $1 billion in 2011, according to Juniper Research. In June, six participants signed up for a mobile dating boot camp, organized by cyber-dating expert Julie Spira, at the iDate Mobile dating conference. They sat before a roomful of industry executives to discuss the apps they used for two weeks and provided honest feedbacks. Developers are turning to real-life concepts to woo users, like the common friend. That’s where Facebook comes in, with apps like Zoosk and Are you Interested? A new wave of apps such as Coffee Meets Bagel and Yoke focus on common friends and use Facebook profile information to match people. “You can judge a person by the company that they keep,” said Mark Brooks, analyst and consultant to the Internet dating industry. "There is no secret formula for an app to succeed", said Brooks. But “the more you can model the real world, the better you’ll do,” he said. New mobile app developers realize this and are tapping into the wealth of information available on Facebook, while trying to balance users’ privacy concerns. Spira says that just like online dating, people should apply common sense with an app.
by Amrita Jayakumar
See full article at Washington Post
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New Dating Sites Take Advantage Of Social Networks
HUFFINGTON POST – May 24 – "Facebook has created a shift from online dating to social dating," said online dating expert Julie Spira. Dating sites such as theComplete.me and Circl.es are using social networks, rather than science, to help singles find romance. The creators of these sites say this will help keep users honest and accountable for their actions. "You can't put up a fake picture and misrepresent yourself on Facebook when you have 600 friends," said Circl.es founder Justin Krause. Yoke.me and theComplete.me, match singles based on personal information shared on Facebook. Yoke.me even invites friends to play matchmaker and set up singles they think would hit it off. "It just takes the stigma attached to online dating and melts it away when you realize you know someone in common," said Brian Bowman, CEO of theComplete.Me.
by Bianca Bosker
See full article at Huffington Post
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Taking A Chance On Love, And Algorithms
NY TIMES – Apr 7 – Yoke.me, a new online dating start-up, pulls in data from Facebook and then generates matches with people from users' extended social circle, based on common interests. Sites and apps like OKCupid, eHarmony, Skout, PlentyofFish and Match.com have attracted loyal followings. But in a world where we can pay someone for lunch by tapping two phones together and stream live television over a tablet computer, the de facto model of browsing through static profiles on a Web site or in a mobile app can feel comically outdated. It may not be a problem that software can solve on its own, said Eli Finkel, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University. “Technology is not the way to figure out who is compatible and will never be,” he said. The system that eHarmony has built is “based on years of empirical and clinical research on married couples,” said Becky Teraoka, an eHarmony spokeswoman. They include “aspects of personality, values and interest, and how pairs match on them, that are most predictive of relationship satisfaction.” While Professors Finkel and Reis question the value of algorithms, they do say that online dating is useful because it can broaden the pool of people you come across on a regular basis. But Kevin Slavin, a game developer who studies algorithms, says those sites are already starting from a flawed base. The digital personas we cultivate on Facebook are often not very indicative of who we are, he said. Rob Fishman, who helmed the development of Yoke.me, says he views the service as an icebreaker.