Yesterday I had coffee with Jeana Frost, creator of Virtual Dates, an application well suited for the icebreaker portion of meeting someone online. You know the feeling. Someone catches your eye, but their profile doesn't leave you with much to start a conversation with. You sit there re-reading the profile over and over, trying to glean that tidbit of information that's going to tip the scale over and have you reaching for the Wink or Email button.
Suffice to say it was clear early on in our conversation that we shared common ground when it comes to our views on the shortcomings of online dating.
Jeana and her fellow academics think the current model for meeting someone online is artificial and static, and far removed from everyday social interaction. I couldn't agree more.
According to Jeana and co's research, online dating is terribly inefficient, lacks appropriate filters and a mechanism for social feedback. Where is the information we really want to know about a person? The attributes we need most that aren't described by income, religion or favorite sports team?
To begin to address the perceived shortcomings of today's dating sites, Jeana built Virtual Dates while at the MIT Media Lab. Virtual Dates is built on Chat Circles, part of of Sociable Media Group.
Chat Circles is an abstract graphical interface for synchronous text conversation. Here, color and form are used to convey social presence and activity, and proximity-based filtering is used intuitively to break large groups into conversational clusters. The system also includes an integrated history interface, which visualizes archival Chat Circle logs. Our goal in this work is to create a richer environment for online discussions.
While I haven't seen the demo, from the description, it sounds like it could be a useful feature for dating and social networking sites, if the user experience is done just right and the final product is properly integrated. It's got to be dead simple to stick on a site like a Userplane chat and tightly integrated, like WeAttract on Yahoo Personals. Speaking of WeAtttract, whatever happened to them?
I'm often frustrated with my dating site clients when it comes to baseline metrics for measuring various site stats. Thankfully, being a Media Lab alumni, Jeana knows how important the role of data logging can be in monitoring and measuring the performance of an application like Virtual Dates.
Thankfully there is a phenomenal testing lab available, Myspace. Unleash your app out into the wild, get 50k users in a few weeks and log loads of data about how people are, and aren't using the service.
Less than half of all singles in the US has tried online dating. The other half remains a cagey quarry unlikely to sign up for a dating site any time soon due to a number of factors, known and unknown.
Dating sites should be doing everything in their power to figure out ways to entice more people to try online dating. Adding social networking features is part of the solution, but the real answer is the unknown and often intangible gut reaction people get to a particular blend of features, user experience and quality of the members. The vibe of a site is often what makes or breaks it's success and it's almost impossible to stumble across the perfect blend of paid subscription, social networking, dating, collaboration and communication tools which will define the online dating experience of the future.
Perhaps applications like Virtual Dates, or an environment based on the concept, is what's needed to entice the other 50 million singles to give online dating a shot.
Jeana's dissertation is titled "Decision Making in the Information Age: A Study of and Design for Online Dating." You can bet that's going to be on my reading shelf in the near future. Harvard Business School did a story on Virtual Dates last week.
Dating and social networking executives would do well to seek out Jeana at jeana.frost at gmail dot com to find out more about how new social interaction applications will drive the next generation of online dating and social networking. If enough interest is drummed up, I'm hoping we'll see Virtual Dates on dating sites soon enough.
