Plentyoffish: Google CTR Down 60%

After Google’s stock took a hit based on reports that Google ads are not being clicked on as much as they use to be, comScore is reporting today that the market may have got it wrongthe evidence suggests that the softness in Google’s paid click metrics is primarily a result of Google’s own quality initiatives that result in a reduction in the number of paid listings and, therefore, the opportunity for paid clicks to occur.In part this might be right, but what’s being ignored by most is a little decision in November that changed the way Google ads worked:Google has made a small change to AdSense that may make a big difference in cutting out errant clicks and even your AdSense revenue. They’ve redefined the clickable region for Google AdSense from the entire boxed region, to just the text link. I’ve been hearing first hand reports since then from publishers who have experienced a big downturn in CTR and Adsense revenue since that change was implemented. Well regarded online marketer Jeremy Schoemaker even recently told me in a podcast that Adsense was dead as a monetization strategy. It’s happening to big sites and small sites. Markus Friend from Plenty of Fish, one of the more famed and bigger free-making money from Adsense sites (January):The CTR on text ads declined about 60% in the last 2 months with googles changes, Image ads on the other hand stayed the same. If you take a screen shot of a text ad and then run it as an image ad it will get 2 times the click thru rate.You read that right, image ads with double the CTR of Google ads when showing the exact same thing.

I wish I could have this problem. Markus has made so much money already, it’s hard to feel sorry for the guy. I haven’t used Google adsense for a while now, because they said I had fraudulent clicks, and didn’t answer any appeals from me. Adsense is a broken product at this point, as far as I’m concerned. If you look hard enough, there are better offerings out there anyway…

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Online Dating News, Uncategorized, Wall of Shame | No Comments »

Microsoft’s “killer” mobile dating app

An interesting patent has surfaced today indicating that Microsoft might be planning to enter the mobile dating industry. The patent, entitled Image-Based Face Search details how Microsoft could be developing complex facial recognition software. The patent explains how a photo could be uploaded from a mobile phone or PC and compared with millions of other pictures to find similar matching faces. Imagine a dating site that allowed you to upload a photo of a certain hot celebrity and then returned profiles of all the users who looked like them? Another implementation of the software is a HotOrNot style application – the user is shown a face and then rates it according to how attractive they find the person. As you can see from the screenshot below the user can say they really like a persons eyes but that they aren’t too keen on the mouth. Microsoft can then take this information and find some matches that are more suited to your tastes. This would have huge potential in the lucrative online dating industry.

From the patent:

A search includes comparing a query image provided by a user to a
plurality of stored images of faces stored in a stored image database,
and determining a similarity of the query image to the plurality of
stored images. One or more resultant images of faces, selected from
among the stored images, are displayed to the user based on the
determined similarity of the stored images to the query image provided
by the user. The resultant images are displayed based at least in part
on one or more facial features.

This disclosure is directed to image-based searching, and is shown
and described in the context of an image-based face search for an
online dating service.  

Traditional image retrieval techniques, such as those used in
facial-recognition, cannot readily be applied to image-based face
retrieval for online dating, since those conventional techniques
typically focus on searching for a specific person (i.e., the same
person depicted in the image used as the query), not other
similar-looking individuals as desired in the online dating arena.
Also, traditional image retrieval applications are not concerned with
how to evaluate similarities between two persons’ faces, and how to
understand what people perceive and evaluate when viewing similar faces.

The image-based search described herein allows users to search
profiles using a desired reference or “query” image. This image based
search may be implemented as an alternative to the textual queries used
on most online dating sites, or may be combined with such textual
queries to provide an augmented image-based face retrieval filter.

I’ve seen a few other companies try this type of looks of facial mapping. I don’t think it will work very well for a site where people are looking for a serious relationship, but it will definitely be a home run for men (men go on looks first), and on sites like adultfriendfinder or onlinebootycall where looks are all that matters.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Online Dating Is Dead

WHAT?!!? Yes, you heard me… it’s dead! The “traditional” online dating site is dead, especially paid sites (Sam I look forward to hear how I am crazy :D).

2008 is the start of the end for paid dating… and if you don’t believe me, go see what wired has to say about the future of business.

Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Finding Love Online, Global Dating Market, Online Dating News, Social Networking, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Give a little, take a little

Who owns your friends (or rather the list of who your friends are and how they are connected to you) has been a big source of debate in the social networking world. Control over that data is what makes social networks like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn so potentially valuable. Yet there has also been a movement afoot towards letting people take their friends with them, if you will, to other sites. In an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Web takes social networks to task for hoarding data. The interview, conducted by Paul Miller, focuses mostly on the Semantic Web, which to Berners-Lee is all about linked data.

Paul Miller:

I think, it is a very grown-up thing to realize that you are not the only social networking site… otherwise it is like a website which doesn’t have any links out. In the Semantic Web similarly, if you don’t have any links out, well, that’s boring.

In fact, a lot of the value of many websites is the links out.

Now if you look at the social networking sites which, if you like, are traditional Web 2.0 social networking sites, they hoard this data. The business model appears to be, “We get the users to give us data and we reuse it to our benefit. We get the extra value.”

So, first of all, are they going to let people use the data? I think, the push now, as we’ve seen during the last year, has been unbearable pressure from users to say, “Look, I have told you who my friends are. You are the third site I’ve told who my friends are. Now, I’m going to a travel site and now I’m going to a photo site and now I’m going to a t-shirt site. Hello? You guys should all know who my friends are.” . . . So, the users are saying, “Give me my data back. That’s my data.”

The new site will fall right in line with all these ideas. Why in this day and age are we still having to fill out yet another profile form. This data is a user’s data, why the heck shouldn’t that have control of it. I think that user backlash for sites that don’t follow these principles will force sites to fall in line. This will be good for consumers in the end, as if the site your on doesn’t give you what you want, you can pack up your data and your friends and take your business elsewhere.

Technorati Tags: date, dating, dataportability

Posted in Api's, Data Portability, Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Uncategorized | No Comments »

OpenSocial is late to the party

Google product manager Amar Gandhi announced in a blog post on Tuesday night that there have been “a couple of modifications” to the company’s release of OpenSocial compatibility for its Orkut social network. In other words, there appears to be some red tape. Instead of immediately rolling out the Orkut platform, which it was originally scheduled to do right around now, Google will be conducting a “prelaunch testing period” for select applications. That will last about four weeks. “We apologize for delaying the launch a few weeks,” Gandhi wrote. “We feel that this prelaunch testing period will ensure that users are introduced to apps in the best way possible.”

I have to say I’m not terribly sad about this, as it will give us some more time to polish our app. When opensocial launches, we will be one of the first dating sites on the scene and will capture the new “free and open” business model. This will give us a huge advantage going forward that sites like Match and Plentyoffish will just not be able to keep up with

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Consumating impotent

Tag based dating site for geeks Consumating is to shut March 15, according to a notice posted to the Consumating forums.

Consumating was acquired by CNet in December 2005 and was later relaunched in June 2006. The sites traffic remained strong in 2006 then fell away in 2007 according to Alexa (the site was too small to register on comScore).

This was actually a pretty cool site, one of the few I liked. It had a fresh approach. I think what really happened was that there was little to no promotion of the site, and I think the name was a little iffy (sort of like Collaboradate). It’s creative, but hard to remember.

Posted in 2006, Buried, consumating, december, geeks, iffy, march, relaunched, remained | No Comments »

HotorNot Sells for Millions

Congrats to James and Jim! This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. The integration with facebook, is what put HotorNot over the edge into something viable. It’s gonna be interesting to see what happens to the site under new ownership…

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Funding, Online Dating News, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Woome Woos cash

WooMe’s online network that can be used for virtual introductions ranging from speed dating to job interviews has just announced a $3 million bridge round, led by Mangrove and previous investors Atomico (which was founded by Nikas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), and Klaus Hommels. WooMe has also added the help of Oliver Jung to aid with the company’s international expansion.

Looks like people may be warming up to a new way to meet online, I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like it would be a little uncomfortable/creepy to meet people this way, but it must be working.

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Dating Video, Online Dating News, Speed Dating, Web 2.0, atomico, friis, klaus, mangrove, nikas, woome, woome’s, zennstrom | No Comments »

Our new dating site has 360 Million users

The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number.

This is great news for us. 360 Million users (theoretically) can now join our site with a login and password they already have. Many users don’t join dating sites because they don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up or giving up a bunch of personal information and a credit card number.

We’re really in a great spot right now, as we’re about a month away from launching with these features in tact and ready to rip. I don’t know of any other dating site that can say that. OpenID, opensocial, facebook… we’re ready to rock!!! Are you?!?!!

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Posted in 360, Api's, Dating 2.0, Online Dating Identity, Web 2.0, bandwagon, ibm, ids, jump, mulling, openid, roughly | No Comments »

Goliath will fall

What’s it take to make $10 million in 12 months in these wonderful times of mighty Web growth? Apparently not very much.

Not very much work, that is. Today’s New York Times delivers a nice, sprightly memo about a 29-year-old coder based in Vancouver, Canada, who managed to put together a dating website, dubbed Plenty of Fish, which, because it is purportedly a self-sustaining entity, requires of its owner, Markus Frind, only about 10 hours per week of attention and care.

I’ve never bought the 10hrs a week figure, I don’t care what anyone says… there is no way to admin a site that size in that amount of time.

What this article fails to realize is that the reason that POF has done so well is because no other free site has really stepped up to challenge POF. Markus was at the right place at the right time. Yes the outdated modem yielding public that still remain love plentyoffish… cause they don’t know any better. As the internet matures, along with the knowledge of it’s users, sites like plentyoffish will be seen for what they are. Outdated relics with little to no innovative or useful functionality.

There is only one other free dating site currently open to the public (until we launch the new site) that is worth taking a look at, and that’s OkCupid. Though Okcupid missed the train on capitalizing on this huge surge in free online dating by trying to base the site around stupid quizzes.

My guess is that 2008 will bring a huge uptick in singles turning to services that bring in data portability, and that utilize existing social graphs, something that no free dating site offers. What about IM? What the heck are these companies doing with their time and money?!!

If they won’t capitalize on what users REALLY want… we will. Thanks for the opportunity guys!

Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Wall of Shame, Web 2.0, care, coder, dubbed, managed, purportedly, sustaining, today’s, what’s | No Comments »

Recession is good for free dating

Now before you start scratching your head on this one let me explain.
A recession is coming, and it’s is not question of if, only when.

So why is this a good thing? Well it won’t be a good thing for some
people, but it will be a good thing for the FREE online dating business.

When the next recession hits, people will likely cut out
entertainment spending before anything else. Sites like match or
eharmony are likely to be some of the first expenses on the chopping
block, and things like Starbucks will be a close second.

Services like ours, and plentyoffish will stand to not only survive,
but I would argue prosper from a weak economy. The argument against
this is that these types of sites make a profit from ads, which in a
weak economy slows down. That may be true, but with an increase in
users and page views from defecting users from paid sites, the difference will most likely offset the
decline in getting less money per click.

Now plentyoffish is not near the quality of a site like match, or
Eharmony, but many people will give up “good” for “good enough” in these troubled times.

Since it seems I’m talking about POF a lot in this post I want to give
Markus some free advice. Markus, on your blog I’m constantly reading
about all the ad opportunities on POF. Why not come up with, and
promote new services and give them free ad space on POF. With those
kind of page views why not build a conglomerate of sites so if your
online dating site dies, you have a choice of other sites and services
to move onto, not to mention adding value if you ever need to sell. Think IAC, but on a much smaller level.

Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Online Dating News, Web 2.0, economy, give, pof, recession, scratching, slows, views, weak | 1 Comment »

Exciting times ahead

Not much action on this blog lately, but for good reason. Me and my partner have been pounding the pavement getting the new project to fruition. We’ve taken a few concepts into play while developing this new project.

1. One click profile import - people are tired of having to spend time filling in the same data over and over. We are going to be the first dating service to actually bring this to fruition. People like myself and Dave from ODI have been asking for this for years. Well Dave, your wish is a reality soon.

2. BYSGWY - Bring your social graph with you. People already have their friends mapped out on services they already use, why are we forced to spell out these relationships over and over and over. These social graphs know which of your friends are single, who just became single, and on and on. We will leverage this data to a single persons advantage.

3. Referrals - A lot of people meet potential mates in the offline world through a friend of a friend, why not bring this online and make it automatic.

4. Searching - Ever wonder how Google got to be so popular? They were fanatical about search. Information is only as good as the ability to filter and find it.

5. Cross site interaction - Why do I have to log into so many different sites to interact with (for the most part) the same people on a daily basis? Why not let people interact anywhere?!?!

6. Communication - As I’ve said before, this is the primary function of any dating site or social network. We’re taking this to a whole new level. Singles communicating anywhere on the web (a dream of mine for years), will finally become reality.

7. An innovative business model - The site will stay free, but we’ve added a sweet twist! I’m surprised, but happy no one has thought of it yet. I’ve kept this idea bottled up for years, but now it’s time to unleash it to the world.

8 Location - Geo location is a another huge part of online dating, we’re going to leverage it in a way that will help people find a great date, online or off.

I would love to go into more details like I used to, but I’ve learned that other dating companies seem to take MY ideas and run with them. I don’t have the resources (money and employees) to chase my own ideas, so for now I will remain vague.

The traditional dating site is dead, and unless these fossils find ways to innovate, they will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Classy, sexy, easy to use, free, and coming soon. No we’re not talking about your perfect date, we’re talking about a new way to date online. Stay tuned…

Posted in Dating 2.0, Online Dating Features, Online Dating News, Social Networking, Web 2.0, action, blog, good, reason | No Comments »

Match puts on a new face

Two new features from Match.com are aimed at getting new users to sign up for the service. One is targeted at the shy crowd, and one is targeted at the outgoing crowd–Facebook.

The Little Black Book feature lets Match.com users find other Facebook members that also have an account on Match.com. From the looks of it, this appears to be a Facebook application that shows Facebook users with Match.com accounts. You’ll get matches from both the Little Black Book (what a fitting name for the Facebook crowd) and Match.com.

Looks like the big guys are finally starting to figure out the power of social networks. Can’t wait until we release our FB and opensocial apps to the world. I’m sure they will be a lot more fun and creative then the corporate guys came up with.

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Online Dating News, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Widgets, black, book, crowd, crowd–facebook, facebook, fitting, shy, targeted | No Comments »

Adult friend finder in trouble for what pops up

Adult dating site AdultFriendFinder, rumored to have been acquired in November for $1 billion is on the wrong side of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) with a settlement that restricts AdultFriendFinder’s promotional activities.

The FTC said in a statement that AdultFriendFinder affiliates used pop-up ads to drive traffic to the site, and exposed consumers, including children to sexual explicit images when search for terms including “flowers,” “travel,” and “vacations.” More seriously the FTC alleged that the ads were also distributed with spyware and adware.

This doesn’t surprise me. Many of the popular sites on the internet (especially adult themed ones), have used shady tactics to get popular. Just look at myspace, which is rumored to be marketing with spam. I have to say that this is a good thing for people (like us) who take the high ground when it comes to marketing.

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Posted in Adult Dating, Dating 2.0, Online Dating News, Site Info, Spam and Security, Wall of Shame, adult, adultfriendfinder, adultfriendfinder’s, affiliates, commission, exposed, ftc, settlement | No Comments »

The bubble bursts, and whys it’s a good thing

Social network for night owls MingleNow appears to have been a victim of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of BlueLithium. According to a post on the service’s blog, MingleNow will officially close on January 7th. No official explanation has been made for the closure. We assume that Yahoo simply isn’t interested in maintaining another social network, especially since its purchase of BlueLithium was for its ad network, not its other holdings. See our early coverage of MingleNow here. The product is now in the deadpool.

ALSO

Edgeio, a company I co-founded in 2005, had a final board meeting this evening and made the decision to shut down operations of the company. We are putting it into the TechCrunch DeadPool.

Edgieo first launched in February 2006 after a beta period. The company raised a small angel round of financing, then in October 2006 closed a $5 million Series A from Intel Capital and Transcosmos.

These are the first of many sites that will go by the wayside soon, you know it’s bad when one of the top web 2.0 news pioneer’s company goes under. Many people see this as a bad thing, but all I see is opportunity. There are so many fly by night operations that just throw up a website and raise a bunch of money, just to pay it out for things like unneeded equipment and employees. Companies that have a lot of people and money loose the essentials of a successful startup - very little money going out, test the idea, refine, repeat.

To all of you with startups, hang in there, because the users of these failed sites will need to spend their time somewhere…

Posted in 2006, General News, Site Info, Social Networking, Startup, Web 2.0, bluelithium, closure, deadpool, explanation, isn’t, maintaining, minglenow | No Comments »

Online dating gets a documentary

A recent MSN dating survey reported that more than 40 million Americans have dated online — a staggering 40 percent of the country’s 100 million single adults according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Unsurprisingly, online dating safety has been a growing concern as more and more Americans log on and hook up.

But at least one Glenwood Springs journalist has his sights set on exposing the common pitfalls of Internet dating, and highlighting easy steps people can take to protect themselves.

Nick Isenberg, a local documentarian and valley resident since 1984, just finished a year researching and interviewing professionals and online daters, culminating in the DVD “Before you Commit: Internet Dating.” The DVD highlights a few cases of online dating that went horribly awry, and also explains how to tell if the people at the other end of your e-mail are who they say they are.

Here is the trailer, not sure if I would recommend buying it as I’m betting most tips they offer you can read about online for free. Still interesting to see a documentary made on the subject.

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Dating Video, Online Dating and Relationship Tips, americans, documentarian, dvd, exposing, isenberg, nick, pitfalls, unsurprisingly | 1 Comment »

Singles get struck by Craigslist’s arrow

When my editor suggested that someone put an ad on Craigslist and find out why people use online dating services to meet people, I was more than eager. Meeting new people has always fascinated me, and it seemed like it might be interesting to use a new forum to make connections. I have to try everything once.

With the risks in mind, I placed a personal ad on Craigslist. I was careful not to include revealing information, but I also tried to be honest. You can’t expect someone to be honest with you if you’re not honest with them as well.

It’s refreshing to see that one of these “on assignment” online daters had a positive experience for a change. Many people are quick to bash online dating, but forget all the terrible dates they went on with people they met in person first. This is a quick and easy read.

Craigslist is a quick and easy way to find a date, but as with other services that try to be everything to everyone, singles are buried in the site. Check out something similar offered by my company: http://www.datesexlove.com. It’s for singles only, so you won’t have to dig around…

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Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Finding Love Online, Online Dating and Relationship Tips, assignment, careful, craigslist, eager, fascinated, honest, revealing, risks | No Comments »

Fed up with online dating

With social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace now in the digital dating mix, there are plenty of new chances to meet the right — and wrong — people online.
art.dating.jpg

Grayson Currin, 24, of Durham, North Carolina, who describes himself as a “big, burly guy,” posted his band’s photograph on his MySpace account and started getting messages from a girl in Canada who had a thing for large, hairy guys. “It felt a little unnatural to me,” says Currin. “I don’t send messages to random girls. I think that’s creepy.”

Jennifer Kelton, a Los Angeles-based writer and creator of the social networking and dating site BadOnlineDates.com maintains that social networking sites offer an attractive alternative to more established online dating sites like Match.com or eHarmony.

“People are fed up with the online dating world,” says Kelton. “They realize that there is a lot of misrepresentation out there. On a social networking site you are interfacing with people on a different level. Facebook and MySpace create more of a safe and loving environment,” she contends.

People are gravitating more to social networks to find potential partners, however what a lot of people fail to notice, is that social networks are like Wal Mart when it comes to online dating. Social networks will work perfectly for finding a hookup, but I would be more then surprised to see people finding a lasting relationship there. Think of online dating as a sniper shot on love, where as facebook and myspace are the shotgun approach. Dating sites do have a lot to learn when it comes to mapping relationships, and user freedom.

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Posted in Dating Industry, Finding Love Online, Social Networking, currin, fed, felt, grayson, kelton, messages, networking, unnatural | No Comments »

Will WooMe Work?

WooMe puts users in quick, 1-on-1 video conferencing sessions during which they can determine whether to pursue a relationship (romantic or otherwise) with the stranger on the other end. While the site is not explicitly marketed as a dating site, it competes quite directly with SpeedDate

The online speed date seems to be the new big thing, though I have yet to hear about any of them being successful? I guess we will have to wait and see…

Posted in Dating 2.0, Dating Video, Speed Dating, Uncategorized, Web 2.0, competes, conferencing, explicitly, marketed, romantic, sessions, speeddate, woome | No Comments »

CrazyBlindDate copies Collaboradate “Group Date”

Sex and spontaneity are the two magic ingredients for a new startup called CrazyBlindDate, which launches today in Boston, New York City, and San Francisco after beta testing in Austin, Texas for over a month.

The idea behind CrazyBlindDate is to bring the scheme of blind dating to the web. Sign up, answer some personal questions (age, height, body type, what type of date you’re looking for, etc.), and indicate the times and neighborhoods you are available to go on a quick date, even if its on very short notice. The site will then use its algorithm to match you up with someone in your area who is available during one of your time slots. Both single and double date arrangements can be made, and you can bring a friend, too, if you’re overly nervous about meeting strangers on your own.

This seems eerily similar to the “Group Date” functionality in Collaboradate, but with integration of SMS. This just shows you how big an advantage a well funded company can get one over on the little guy. I’m not saying that the idea was stolen outright, but the no show penalty and the reviews are pretty much a direct copy. On a positive note, we’ve narrowed down the new name for Collaboradate, and also the associated facebook and opensocial apps are already in development.

The redesigned UI is almost done, and the one click app add is also starting to shape up. Look for a lot of exciting news in the next few weeks…

[via]

Posted in Beta, Dating 2.0, Online Dating Features, Online Dating News, Site Info, Wall of Shame, Web 2.0, algorithm, crazyblinddate, group, narrowed, outright, penalty, scheme, you’re | No Comments »

IAC - The Breakup

InterActiveCorp (IAC), parent company of Ask.com, Bloglines, Evite, and dozens of other popular Web sites, has decided to split itself into five separate, publicly traded companies. The hotter of IAC’s properties (it’s so-called “media & advertising” and “emerging businesses” groups) will remain under the IAC brand, while slower growth units HSN, Ticketmaster, and LendingTree will become separate companies.

I wonder where this will leave Match? This is for the investors, for the company to look better on paper, that’s about it…

[via]

Posted in Dating Industry, Global Dating Market, Online Dating News, Uncategorized, advertising”, businesses”, hotter, iac, separate, slower, units, “emerging | No Comments »

Collaboradate.com no more…

Some big things to announce.

Collaboradate.com is going away But wait! Not to worry, just the name is going away. I’m excited to announce that I’ve brought in a partner, and this was the first order of business.

We are not set on the new name yet, but over the past few years I’ve been stockpiling great dating domain names…

The site is also going to go through some drastic changes, one of the key ones is the tie in to opensocial. We have know that the day was coming when it would be available, and that day has come. This ties directly into the widgeting concept that I came up with for Collaboradate. Now users will have a huge database of cool apps to use and share.

_________________ will be the only true destination for singles online.

Opensocial will bring great features like a one click import of your myspace profile, friend of a friend connections, and the list goes on and on and on. I hope sites like plentyoffish and OkCupid are aware of the impact of this, and have been planning to get aboard, or get run over.

That last peak of the mountain is always the hardest to climb, well folks here I am, forearms on fire, but I will see the top…

Posted in Api's, Beta, Dating 2.0, Dating Industry, Development, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Widgets, announce, brought, excited, order, partner, past, wait, worry | No Comments »

The biggest news in Online Dating and Social Networking in years

The official news is out on the MySpace and Google deal, first rumored earlier today. The big news: the two companies have actually been working together on OpenSocial all along, which launches officially tonight.

Other “founding partners” of the project include: Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING. So much for OpenSocial only having the “b-list” of social networks as the original reports indicated. In addition to #1 ranking MySpace, partner Six Apart owns Typepad, LiveJournal, MovableType, and Vox, while new addition Imeem has also become a rising star.

This is absolutely huge. The fact that Enagage got included as one of the “founding partners” makes me pretty jealous as that will be an uptick in notoriety and not to mention the access to all those users is HUGE! I am excited to see the details of this API but like anything from Google it will large and in charge. Does this play into my last post? A little bit, as Facebook is considered by many as the premiere social network, though myspace has the sheer numbers, and on the web everything is a numbers game, crap or not… just look at plentyoffish. Comments?

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Posted in Api's, Beta, Dating 2.0, Finding Love Online, Online Dating News, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Widgets, addition, hyves, imeem, ning, officially, opensocial, plaxo, salesforce | No Comments »

Google IS turning into the “Evil Empire”

Today I tired to login to my Google adsense account. Upon logging in, it said that my application had been “disapproved”. Now I have been using this account for years, so I don’t get the application part.

The account had been acting strangely as of late (missing channels, lower then normal earnings, etc.), so I emailed customer service. The channels came back, but the earnings were still not on par. Then I logged into my account one day and it said I needed to contact customer support, which I did (email support is all they offer, which is total shit), and never got a email back. Then today, out of nowhere, my account is completely gone.

WTF Google?!?! I am severely not happy, I may have to take my add purchases, and publishing somewhere else.

Posted in Uncategorized, Wall of Shame | No Comments »

Some new projects

Hey folks, haven’t been blogging a lot this week. I had a good friend of mine pass over the weekend, so needless to say I’ve been more then a little out of it. I had been moping around, but I found that if I keep busy working It will keep me from being so sad.

A couple of things to announce. I’ve started a few new projects that are coming to fruition. The first is a social political news site (http://socialvote.com), with an accompanying Facebook app to be released late this evening. Social Vote is my attempt to bring Political News to the masses, rather then allowing the media to spin what they think we want to hear. I used to be very involved in politics, and knowing what was going on on that realm. Discontentment drove me from caring, this is my attempt to get back in the saddle.

The next site I would like to mention is Gle.am. It’s Celebrity Gossip and News at it’s best. I knew there was a market here when all my female friends waste there time at work browsing Perez Hilton and the like. I really excited about both of these sites as they bring the power of news back to the people.

Mytella is another project I’ve been working on for years. It’s the next generation of communication and collaboration. Look for a new release soon. You will no longer need 10 different apps running just to get what you need done online.

Collaboradate is yet again getting a total revamp, we went back to the drawing board once again, and redesigned many of the Ajax functionality. As I review the latest build all I can say is WOW! This is going to be really cool…

Posted in Dating 2.0, General News, Just Because, Site Info, Web 2.0, blogging, folks, friend, mine, moping, needless, pass, weekend | 1 Comment »