And on the seventh day God rested, not! Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day you shall enable wifi and visit Plentyoffish.com.

Last Sunday, while I was brunching and then crashed on the couch watching movies after a 3am Saturday night blowout, six million people managed to log into Plentyoffish. That is just unreal.

I started getting grumpy trying to decipher the x-axis of the chart, Markus. what is 183?

If you own a dating site, consider taking next Sunday off  to figure out why Markus is 10 laps ahead of you.

How can that be? Skill, timing and luck. Markus has enjoyed an enormous amount of all three.

My default setting has always been that dating sites embark on all sorts of sketchy black/grey-hat marketing. That way when I meet someone Doing It Right I can act pleasantly surprised (this hardly ever happens).

There are number of people who keep close tabs on Plentyoffish, its traffic and growth. I get reports from people every so often, usually from bitter rivals looking to dethrone Markus by exploiting his Magic Secret. But the general consensus is always a lot of forehead-smacking and WTF. It seem that somehow Plentyoffish has a direct line to an astonishing amount of singles around the world while people in the dating and marketing industries tend to automatically think they are doing something fishy.

As far as the dating industry goes, its unfortunate that so many sites have to engage in stuff like incentive marketing (scammy), profile buying (don’t forget to edit that Terms of Service), cheap bouncy traffic (kills site quality) and all of the other sketchy marketing practices that *anyone* trying to make a buck on the Internet are forced to engage in to build a business. Google and Facebook did this, go complain to them.

As I like to tell the haters, go get Lady Gaga to mention your site in one of her videos. Watching keyword pricing and performance all day is one thing (and you will get rich if you are any good at it and your site doesn’t suck too badly), but getting Gaga to love you? Now thats real marketing.

Read Yay finally passed 6 million logins/day.

Related posts:

1. PlentyOffish has a bigger aquarium
2. Plentyoffish “Destroys” online dating business model
3. PlentyOfFish Dating Survey Results

Fernando Ardenghi thinks behavioral matching on dating sites doesn’t work. To support his argument he’s put together a list of academic papers supporting his belief that the dating industry needs to implement the 16PF5 Questionnaire instead.

A few weeks ago I went to Dallas to spend some time with Match.com. During my visit I got to spend an hour with the brains behind Match.com’s recommendation system. After seeing what they have been up to and the behavioral matching that has been baked into the site, I came away impressed. I’ll have more on this in upcoming posts.

What do you think matches people more effectively, a modern personality test or behavioral recommendation system, a blend of both or something completely different?

1- “Do Birds of a Feather Flock Together? A Differential Approach to Similarity Effects in the Association Between Personality Traits and Life Satisfaction in Intimate Relationships” 2011
Katrin Furler & Veronica Gomez.
2- “Personality similarity between self, partner and parents” 2011
Dick P. H. Barelds & Pieternel Dijkstra.
3- “An assessment of positive illusions of the physical attractiveness of romantic partners” 2011
Dick P. H. Barelds, Pieternel Dijkstra, Namkje Koudenburg and Viren Swami.
4- “Perceptions of Ideal and Former Partners’ Personality and Similarity” 2010
Pieternel Dijkstra / Dick P. H. Barelds.
5- “Personality similarity, perceptual accuracy, and relationship satisfaction in dating and married couples” 2011
Mieke Decuyper, Marleen De Bolle and Filip De Fruyt.
6- “Goal Complementarity in Intimate Relationships: Is Couples’ Perception of Acting in Concert Positively Related to Subjective Well-Being?” 2011
Karin Stadler & Veronica Gomez.
7- “It’s that time of the month: The effects of hormonal shifts on female mate value, depressive symptomology, and short term mating orientation.” 2011
Heather Adams and Victor Luévano.
8- “The Relations Between Actual and Perceived Similarity in Personality” 2011
Jessica Wortan & Dustin Wood.
9- “Similarity predicts relationship satisfaction in Brazil” 2011
Erina Lee, Gian Gonzaga.
10- “Assortative mating, convergence, and satisfaction in married couples” 2010
Gian Gonzaga, Steve Carter and J. Galen BuckWalter.
11- “Predicting relationship and life satisfaction from personality in nationally representative samples from three countries: the relative importance of actor, partner, and similarity effects.” 2010
Portia Dyrenforth et al.
12- “Why Mate Choices are not as Reciprocal as we Assume: The Role of Personality, Flirting and Physical Attractiveness” 2010
Lars Penke, et al.
13- “What lies beneath: The linguistic traces of deception in online dating profiles. Journal of Communication.” 2010
Toma, C. & Hancock, J.T.
14- “Genetic and environmental influences on personality trait stability and growth during the transition to adulthood: A three wave longitudinal study.” 2010
Hopwood, C.J., Donnellan, M.B., Blonigen, D.M., Krueger, R.F., McGue, M., Iacono, W.G., & Burt, S.A.
15- “Is spousal similarity for personality a matter of convergence or selection?” 2010
Mikhila N. Humbad, M. Brent Donnellan, William G. Iacono et al.
16- “From Dating to Mating and Relating: Predictors of Initial and Long-Term Outcomes of Speed-Dating in a Community Sample” 2010
Lars Penke, et al.
17- “The attraction–similarity model and dating couples: Projection, perceived similarity, and psychological benefits” 2010
Marian M. Morry, Mie Kito and Lindsey Ortiz.
18- “Personality influences on marital satisfaction: Integrating the empirical evidence using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (APIM) model” 2009
Charania & Ickes.
19- “Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?” 2009
Alvergne & Lummaa.
20- “Human oestrus” 2008
Gangestad & Thornhill
21- “Only the congruent survive – Personality similarities in couples. Personality and Individual Differences” 2008
Rammstedt & Schupp.
22- “Personality trait change in adulthood.” 2008
Roberts, B. W. & Mroczek, D.
23- “Do People Know What They Want: A Similar or Complementary Partner?” 2008
Dick P. H. Barelds & Pieternel Dijkstra.
24- “Personality Trait Similarity Between Spouses in Four Cultures” 2008
McCrae, Martin, Hrebícková, Urbánek, Boomsma et al.
25- “Love at first sight or friends first? Ties among partner personality trait similarity, relationship onset, relationship quality, and love” 2007
Dick P. H. Barelds & Pieternel Dijkstra.
26- “Preferences for symmetry in faces change across the menstrual cycle.” 2007
Little, A. C., Jones, B. C., Burt, D. M. & Perrett, D. I.
27- “Assortative mating for perceived facial personality traits. Personality and Individual” 2006
Little, AC, Burt, DM & Perrett, DI.
28- “The ideal romantic partner personality” 2006
Figueredo, Sefcek & Jones.
29- “Social Structure and Personality Assortment Among Married Couples” 2006
Bekkers, van Aken & Denissen.
30- “A New Method for Dimensionality Reduction using K-Means Clustering Algorithm for High Dimensional Data Set” International Journal of Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 13– No.7, January 2011
31- “Addressing the new user problem with a personality based user similarity measure” 2010
Marko Tkalcic, Matevz Kunaver, Andrej Kosir, Jurij Tasic
32- “Towards to Psychological-based Recommenders Systems: A survey on Recommender Systems” 2010
Maria Augusta Nunes
33- “Design and User Issues in Personality-based Recommender Systems” 2010
Rong Hu

Read more at Breaking the Online Dating Sound Barrier.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry Links for 10-21-2010
2. Facebook Ad Targeting Still Not Good Enough
3. Behavioral Targeting Beats Contextual Targeting

Logged into OkCupid and realized I had a ton of emails sitting in my inbox, oops. I spent and hour cleaning out my inbox and writing emails, here are a few screenshots and some commentary.

This is fantastic, I love that this woman explained The Good, The Bad and the Ugly about her.  Really, most guys could care less about how much women like to travel or how nice and kind she is, thats all subjective and usually off-base anyways.

People fill their profiles with way too much superficial crap that nobody cares about. Give me the Good, The Bad and the Ugly anytime. Related: Exposing Fatal Flaws.

One woman was unable to muster up enough strength to type more than “very good looking,” which, while pleasant to receive, immediately put her in the “don’t bother” category. However, I responded that I wasn’t interested and tried to help her understand where she missed the mark. These emails make it way too easy to hit the delete key.

OkCupid has been making a lot of changes lately. This is an older feature but I love that you have to send at least 50 characters with a wink.

The whole “show interest” thing that most sites do is generally a crap-tastic feature. Either provide some depth and context to a reach-out, or skip it. I’m sure woman love that men have to say at least a little something  to send winks on OkCupid, wonder what the most common phrases are.

This is a classic. Underneath a wink from a person who doesn’t exist on the site anymore we find an ad for a story on The Daily Beast about dating people on Twitter. Its clearly an ad, but links to a blog post and it’s a negative ad overall. I bet it gets clicked on a *lot*.

A Guide to Writing the Most Generic OkCupid Profile Ever. Spot on.

See How OK Cupid’s Amazingly Sarcastic Customer Service Policy Devolved Into A User Threatening Violence. I’ve seen many emails to top dating site customer service departments, this one is pretty generic IMHO. Single people tend to have big chips on their shoulders if they feel they are not being treated like kings and queens and customer service has to deal with it, every day, all day. Not an enviable job.

One last screenshot, this one is of the new chat bar the sits at the top of the browser window and follows as you scroll down while viewing someone’s photos. Love it! Give people more chances to interact.

This useful feature is yet another reason why measuring site popularity via pageviews and visitors is broken and needs to evolve. Plus the fact that much ad/incentive/affiliate dating site traffic are people who hit the landing page and bounce, effectively adding zero benefit to the sites popularity.

The idea of visiting a new “page” to email someone is quaint. Most websites could be a single page that evolves over the duration of the visit. We can thank Facebook for this. Actually, there will be no “web pages” on the Internet in a few years, but that is a story for another time.

Related posts:

1. OKCupid’s Red Light, Green Light
2. OKCupid Adds Forums
3. OKCupid Ice Breakers in Beta

Forbes blogger Kashmir Hill talks about the price of various pieces of personal information available from Rapleaf, an online tracking company with millions of consumer profiles and over one billion email addresses in its database.

Whether you have a spouse and children is worth just two cents to data buyers, while knowing you have a smartphone is much more valuable — $0.03.

I wonder if any dating sites are using this information for verification or profile development purposes. View Data Pricing From Rapleaf.

Related posts:

1. Are Facebook Application Users Worth $1.40 a Piece?
2. Job: eHarmony Data Modeller Architect
3. Opinity and Rapleaf Partner

The Like-Ification of 2011: Saad Khan is an investor I’ve spoken to a few times. He writes for, among other things, VentureBeat, and I really liked this statement he made about Liking things on Facebook.

If 2010 was about gamification, then 2011 will belong to people who can figure out what to do with what we like.

last July more than 65 million people were “like-ing” stuff on a daily basis. That’s more than 17.5 billion “likes” over nine months.

Its imperative that dating sites begin leveraging what people Like on Facebook. DateBuzz used to pull in your likes, tastes and preferences, but thats the easy part. Now its time for intrepid dating pioneers to build matching systems that take Likes as fuel and output better matches based on the fact that we Like Celine Dion, tractor pulls, Sarah Palin and Egypt.

If you can’t afford  a dozen people working on a behavioral matching system for your site, at the least you can pull in likes and start building a foundation profile of your members based on Facebook “exhaust” as the cool kids call it now.

Another quote of interest:

Xbox Kinect already authenticates my face and pairs it with my player profile. Imagine what that could mean for your status updates.

Can you imagine updating your dating profile by standing in front of an Xbox and talking? Futuristic indeed, but hey kids, thats the direction our digital lives are heading.

What are some startup ideas that persistently fail?

Here’s a quote from Quora, the best Q&A site you’ve never heard of.

Yet another dating site
Why?
1) Insufficient distinction from all of the other dating sites
2) I lie about my weight/income/humor – you lie about your fitness/degree of bitterness/coolness and thus a high level of disappointment and frustration follow.

StreetSpark, the new iPhone app for offline dating

StreetSpark lets you know when you’re in the right place at the right time to meet your match. StreetSpark’s “Social Matching” technique garners your activity across other social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, and Foursquare and then matches you to other StreetSpark users, creating more real matches, based not only on common interests but also the recent activities you share, letting you live your life without interference and constant checking.

Related posts:

1. Online Dating Industry News For June 29, 2010
2. Online Dating Industry News: 2-1-11 Snowmageddon Edition
3. Online Dating Industry News For March 15, 2010

Many online dating executives have purchased Subscription Site Insider’s Subscription & Membership Site Benchmark Report and read Paywall Times.

Ann Holland and her crew have been pumping out seriously great subscription-based webinars. This next one looks great, three content publishers will reveal the secrets behind their profitable subscription apps exclusively during Subscription Site Insider’s new webinar. Sign up today!

You’ll discover:

• Pricing:Which prices work best for b2b vs consumer content apps. Should your app price be different from your print or other online prices?
• Offers: Discounts, “sale”, extended term, and premium offers buyers respond best to.
• Marketing: How to go beyond the obvious to aggressively promote app sales.
• Previews: What should your ‘free preview’ content consist of?
• Working with Apple: How to make the most of your publisher relationship, and when to expect cash to start arriving.
• Subscriber Privacy: Clever ways to get buyers to agree to give you their contact info.
• Content: Design, navigation, and content-types that create must-buy user experiences
• Metrics: What you can measure, what you can’t, and how to use the numbers to improve your promotional tactics

Plus, includes 3 ‘take-action’ aids to boost your subscription app profit potential:

#1. Live Q&A during the webinar itself — ask real-life publishers for advice about your own subscription apps or app launch ideas.

#2. Downloadable Checklist – you’ll receive a four-page interactive Checklist the day after the webinar. Use it to put ideas into action.

#3. On-Demand Recording — You’ll also receive an on-demand recording of this webinar afterwards so you can review the most important points with your team and make decisions for your site’s immediate future.

Webinar details

• Thurs May 26, 1-2pm ET
• Starring 3 real-life publishers, including Popular Science
• $247.00 webinar is FREE for Members
• Live Q&A, Downloadable Checklist & On-demand Recording included with your ticket

Sign up today!

Related posts:

1. Paid Subscription Marketing Via Facebook Webinar
2. Paid Subscription Marketing Via Facebook Webinar
3. Webinar: Top 7 Paywall Site Tests

Just got off the phone with Joel Schwartz, who is busy getting ready to launch a voice-based social networking tool called Parlor.fm at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

Some of you may remember Joel from iDate in Miami a few years ago when he was at Teltech, which debuted it’s LoveDetect service. I absolutely loved that service but Teltech seems to have ended up focusing on spoofing caller ID and other telcom apps.

Parlor is a unique, voice-based social network featuring an array of interconnected mini-apps to suit a variety of business and social purposes. Parlor is integrating the quality and intimacy of voice communication with the high-speed connectivity of the digital world.

One reason I am partial to the idea of voice-based social networking is because I wrote a business plan outlining a VOIP-based social network based on Skype almost six years ago.

With nothing to test at Parlor yet, all we can do is debate whether or not people want to talk more on the phone, or less, and in what context. Much of what Parlor will do is already done by millions of people via Skype. So the question becomes, what can Parlor do better than Skype? Perhaps there is a value-added feature, or unintended consequence that will drive Parlor’s adoption rates.

Do 20-somethings want to talk on the phone to strangers? How about the over 50 crowd? Singles do this on late-night chat lines. Business people don’t want to be on the phone, it kills productivity in many cases. How would a business leverage voice? I see you on LinkedIn, I arrange to directly contact you or get a warm introduction, we email back and forth for a round and then move to a phone conversation. Would I do this on Parlor instead of or in addition to LinkedIn?

I haven’t had a fax machine or a landline for almost a decade and I almost exclusively use Skype or Facetime on iPhone. The idea of calling a phone number to chat with people in this day and age feels positively antiquated. Voice and video profiles, now there’s something. Perhaps there are enough people on the planet who would love to talk to each other and bring a bit of the Myspace discovery functionality to the networking-with-friends world of Facebook.

Maybe there are millions of people who want to talk about model trains or politics. I don’t know. What I do know is that Facebook will roll out some sort of voice feature in the near future, but that doesn’t mean that Parlor can’t find its footing in a specific age range, demographic, interest group or even dating.

I have worked with a number of VOIP and voice-based startups over the years. Most have had wins in business sectors and flailed in the consumer space. Something tells me that Parlor needs a video component to really catch the eye of consumers.

Dating sites, would you use something like Parlor to bring members closer together on your site?

Full Parlor.fm press release.

Related posts:

1. Social Networking Goes Old-School
2. Meeting Voice and Image Analysis Startups
3. Playboy Launching Social Network

* Another guy proposes to girlfriend with some movie magic

* Celeb moms who’ve rocked a bikini while pregnant

* Video: Katie Holmes puts on her swimsuit for a pool party with Suri while
Tom films!

* Top 10 tastes to tackle during your next trip to Hawaii

* Awesome manicure ideas to try this Summer

* Get a sneak peek at the latest designs by Robert and Cortney Novogratz

* HIMYM poll: who do you want Barney to marry?

* Wallet-friendly tips for gifting the bride and groom

* Kristen Bell and Lea Michele keep fit by rock climbing

* Teach yourself new tricks with free online education sites

* Make your own statement necklace

* Leonardo DiCaprio and Blake Lively cuddle up in Cannes!

* PopSugar City LA: drop in on the city’s best yoga studios and classes

Share With Friends: | | Society – Dating Stories, RSS and RSS Feed via Feedzilla.

* Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sex scandals over the years - Yahoo! Shine

* 12 celebs who are related to royals, including Johnny Depp! - The Frisky

* Crackpot “study” finds black women are uglier than other races. What?! -
The Hairpin

* Jesse James “wouldn’t change anything” - Betty Confidential

* This seven-story “Tower of Babel” is made from books! - Flavorwire

* How do you get your mate to cuddle more? – Em & Lo

* Why politicians and other powerful men cheat – YourTango

Source: Flickr User ValetheKid

Share With Friends: | | Society – Dating Stories, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.