Online dating (still) sucks. You’d think that by now we’d be farther along in finding a solution. It seems like every day there are more “features,” but fewer and fewer success stories.
Here are 8 reasons why:
- Fake Pictures. You have no idea what the person you’re talking to really looks like. Those photos could be 5 years old. You don’t even know if they’re using their real name.
- Poor Filtering. You spend hours browsing profiles that don’t even meet minimum, objective criteria, like education level or location. You get messages from people who are out of your age range – why can they even see your profile?
- Can’t tell who is actually interested. There is a weird ritual of sending messages back and forth. Often, this leads nowhere. It’s creepy to be direct and say “You seem attractive. We may click in person. Want to meet up this week and find out?”
- Creating a profile is a huge pain. Can a personality test or “About Me” section really capture who you are and convey this to a stranger?
- You may see someone you know. For most people, this prospect is awkward if not downright frightening.
- Data never disappears online. If you send a message to someone and the discussion fizzles out, that message is still in your inbox for weeks, months, maybe even years. People forget things; they move on; they become friends instead (or not). But the internet always remembers.
- Rejection is painful, and there is more of it online. It’s so easy to block, delete, or simply not respond to someone online. At least at a bar, you have to acknowledge potential suitors… online, rejection is as simple as a mouse click, but it hurts just as much.
- It just feels juvenile. Let’s face it, creating endless profiles and lists of likes/interests is a legacy of the MySpace years. Qualitative, open ended questions should be asked in person on dates, not on multiple choice forms on websites.
Am I missing anything?
As someone who is completely insane, I decided that I would build a better dating website. Something more adult, for smart people who know what they’re looking for. I’d build a site that minimizes rejection, uses real names and photos, doesn’t require you to create a profile, and only shows you people who match your exact criteria (and you match theirs). And finally, I’d filter out everyone you already know. Sounds impossible, right?
This is what I came up with. I’m calling it “Circl.es” because I had this (Spanish) domain laying around (long story). Here is how it works:
- You sign up with Facebook. I know people hate this, but it is critical for this concept for two reasons: it allows me to filter out all your Facebook friends, and it verifies your true identity.
- You select your criteria. It’s simple, it’s objective, and it filters two ways – if someone doesn’t meet your criteria, you don’t see them, and they don’t see you.
- You view people by their public Facebook pages. This is already out there – no need to make a new profile. You see real names, real pictures – the picture he/she uses with friends (whatever is publicly available – you can customize it in your privacy settings). You see mutual friends (if any). You see a legitimate person.
- Sort by location. Let’s keep it simple and convenient – if a potential match lives across the street, don’t you want to interact with him/her first before schlepping across town for someone?
- You click Yes, No, or Skip. You don’t need to exchange canned messages. You can see their real picture and read their blurb. You simply click Yes, No, or Skip. If you both click Yes, you are both notified. If you click No, the other person never sees your profile.
- Communicate over Facebook. If there is mutual attraction, we email you, and that’s where things end. Message the person on Facebook and set up a date somewhere cool.
- Matches expire after two weeks. Two weeks is plenty of time to get into contact with someone if there is a real interest. If not, or if things fizzle, you don’t need to be constantly reminded with some rando’s picture in your queue.
Does this sound like something worthwhile? Then please give it a try. It takes three minutes to set up. There won’t be many people early on; it’s the chicken and egg thing – someone’s gotta be first.
If you like the site and concept, please share with your friends! You can use the buttons below, vote me up on Hacker News, or use the sharing buttons on Circl.es itself. Please, please take just a moment to help me spread the word – I’d be very grateful!
My facebook photo is from 1968, taken on the back steps of the photo-lab I used as a combat photographer in Vietnam. While cool, needless to say it is not what I’d call current. Nice idea though, good luck!
Well, that’s just badass, so I say you can use that all you want to get dates!
Good ideas. I’d say the biggest turnoff for me personally is that I don’t use Facebook. I have a Facebook for contact purposes but its not really used anymore as their numerous privacy breeches annoy me. It would be nice to pull some basic data out of the profile to pre-populate the profile. PoF (plentyoffish) does have the double-opt-in matching feature (yes / no / maybe).
I would never create a business 100% dependent upon another business (Facebook).
Just say’n
@Ted, I see why not. Most websites rely on Google to get hits.
Good luck!
Uh, no, this post is pretty clueless even before someone hands you a dictionary with the word “stalker” circled in read. You might want to also go look up some of the horror stories out there about what Facebook does with user data.
Signing in/up with Facebook is a complete and absolute nonstarter. There is a screening process that needs to take place before that kind of detail is reached in a dating relationship.
I have heard this from several people but I think it may be overblown – your public Facebook profile is already available to people in random groups on Facebook, friends of Friends, on pages for events you are attending, and probably also on Google.
Why is connecting with a person who matches a specific set of criteria (which you set) for the purpose of finding a date different?
If you are upfront about your identity – and require others to be with theirs – doesn’t that save a lot of time and help immensely with the screening process early on?
I have to agree with Justin. You control who sees your profile. My privacy setting are ridiculously high and I am super careful about which friends can see what. The stalker thing is frankly a non issue with regards to this app, i e, if someone is going to go through the trouble of stalking you, they aren’t going to add the extra step of trying this app, they are going to pull up youropenbook.org and browse potential victims anonymously.
All of that being said, everyone is still weary of how facebook uses its data and I see no reason why that would change in the future. Further, people don’t like signing into apps with facebook. Period. Many, many application developers have written about this.
I think the online dating model is broken. There might even be a solution out there, but as it stands now, this isn’t it. I’m sorry, but outside of major (and I mean major) population centers, you are not going to get enough ‘trusting’ users to support this idea to a point where it would work (i e have enough users to generate matches). Never mind, to a point where you can have some business model successful enough to keep this project going.
But look on the bright side, you can always chat up the cute blonde in Starbucks.
Awesome idea! Love it!
You have some interesting ideas, but I’m not sure you’ve come up with a “fix”.
“You spend hours browsing profiles that don’t even meet minimum, objective criteria, like education level”
Bad example? I don’t know why I’d care at all about education level. (FWIW, I have a 4-year degree, and my best friends range from “barely finished high school” to “multiple PhDs”.) There are one or two “objective criteria” I want to filter on, but from what I’ve seen dating sites already do that. I don’t think that “increased objective filtering” would make my top-50 complaints about dating sites.
“You sign up with Facebook. I know people hate this,”
You’d think if everybody hates something, that could be kind of a dealbreaker for the service.
“but it is critical for this concept for two reasons: it allows me to filter out all your Facebook friends, and it verifies your true identity.”
I see two problems here. First, not everybody I know uses their “true identity” on Facebook — pseudonyms are not uncommon, as are “public/private identity” accounts.
Second, filtering out my FB “friends” doesn’t actually do that much, unless I first go and “FB friend” everybody in the world (or at least my city) that I know. And I’m not going to do that just to use a new service (see: “Creating a profile is a huge pain”). Outside of your service, that would give me *negative* value. This is worse for users than just making a whole new network, and offering “paste all your friends’ names here: ___” as one of the sign-up options, and imagine how many people you’d lose from doing that.
“You view people by their public Facebook pages. This is already out there – no need to make a new profile. You see real names, real pictures – the picture he/she uses with friends (whatever is publicly available – you can customize it in your privacy settings). You see mutual friends (if any). You see a legitimate person.”
It’s not obvious to me whether this is better or worse than a profile created just for dating. It’s not as if Facebook shows you an accurate portrait of a person, either! And at least half of my FB friends (including me), you cannot even recognize by our FB photos, for example (see: “Fake pictures”). Again, not necessarily a dealbreaker on its own, but it means I’d have to change my FB profile to be more dating-site-friendly, at which point, your advantage is lost.
“if a potential match lives across the street, don’t you want to interact with him/her first before schlepping across town for someone?”
I don’t know. Do I? I guess it depends on the person. All else being equal, maybe so, but all else is never equal. (Am I looking for a relationship or a booty call?)
After thinking about it for a minute, I’m much more likely to create a new dummy Facebook account for dating (and not care that it would show me my friends sometimes), than I would be to use my existing Facebook account for a new dating service. That doesn’t mean your dating site isn’t going to work, but it does suggest to me that its stated benefits aren’t draws for people like me (if there are any). Without signing up, I can’t actually see anything except the FAQ, so it’s a little hard to see if this is even something I’d want to try.
clever idea
Your form for entering information is very broken, the body type refuses to be anything but athletic, and trying to pick a religion other than agnostic breaks everything
thank you for letting me know!!
fixed – apparently I can’t spell atheist in my queries
I really appreciate letting me know about this, thanks
Honestly a pretty good idea and great execution! Nice work, I signed up I’d say the other big pain point of online dating is girls get too many messages and burn out. You may have a clever solution to this as well by trying to measure quality (ratio of yes/nos) and limiting messages to popular accounts.
Anyway, congrats on launching.
It’s a good idea, but you might want to not show last names. Maybe last initial/not at all. Last names lead to stalkers.
It would be nice if there were local only servers. Maybe you and the server both have FM radio cards and there is a protocol to compute a pair sound signatures and exchange them. You can only enter the server if these match.
This way you could at least be sure that you are only being scammed by someone in the neighborhood and not by the entire world.
It seems like most of your issues with online dating come from an unwillingness to adapt to the new field. What is wrong with “You’re attractive and seem interesting, let’s meet up.” Not only is that the whole point of online dating, but that message works. Playing hard to get makes no sense online.
you’ve been doing it wrong…
It’s an interesting idea. Before I got married, I tried one of the popular dating sites and had very little success. It was a poor investment of my time. This sounds like a better one.
If you get serious about monetization – or want to learn more about the dating vertical and advertising, we’d love to chat. We’ve been an affilate an agency for many properties. Great v1.0 here – cheers to the effort!
Justin, because online dating is becoming more normal, and it’s a group of people who are already self-selected, none of these are real problems except for two:
“Can’t tell who is actually interested” <= this is why OkCupid has the "how willing are you to meet", which is clearly not foolproof.
"Too easy to reject" <= and not because it's painful, but rather because you might reject someone because of some stupid detail that you read in their profile that might not actually be a big deal in real life.
How might one structure an online dating website to circumvent these problems?
1) You create a profile. This can be fun! make all sorts of user-generated questions, like OkC, create ways of racking up a points, etc. Maybe you get heatmaps of where like-minded people like to hang out, etc.
2) the service gives you FIVE options. Only five. Maybe if you haven't submitted enough information, you only get one, two, three, then four options (creating incentive to fill out a fuller profile). You don't get to see their pictures. You do get to see ten *random* details about them. That's it.
3) Out of your five options, you can start messaging prospective dates. You get a maximum of three messages, and then you agree upon when and where you might want to go on a date. When (and if) both parties have compatible times or places, then the service texts the info, as well as a secret passcode.
4) Both parties can exchange passcodes in order to rate their date and unlock the ability to get five more options. You also can rate your date. This encourages people to have fun, and to not be super-shallow, or a jerk, on the date.
5) if you get five rejections based on your initial messages, the system will give you five more options.
Monetization. Service can make money various ways, but it should really mostly be ad driven.
The reason why this is liable to work is because it's self-selecting. People who aren't actually interested in meeting other people will not last on the system very long.
it’s an interesting idea. I think there is room for more than one solution – most people I know are on multiple platforms. you should build it!
I’m glad you are trying something but I think you’re pretty off base.
I’d argue the #1 reason online dating sites don’t work is because it’s too easy to be super picky. When you meet someone in person, at a party, a bar, a casual gathering, a conference, wherever. You don’t have a lot of information. You go on if you’re physically attracted first or at least not repulsed, then you go on various personality traits, whether the conversation is good which usually happens to be based on both conversation skills and chemistry.
Online though people poor through the profile and look for any tiny reason to reject someone. I don’t think they really realize they’re doing it but they do. Their profile says they want someone fit. You’re not overweight but you don’t consider yourself fit so you don’t contact. You think that comes up in real life? Their profile says they like hiking. You think, I don’t hike much so they probably won’t like me and don’t bother to write even though it’s likely they hike less than once a year. Their profile says they want someone who goes to the gym regularly yet they are unlikely to even consider that topic meeting someone live. Unless the person they are meeting is noticeably overweight. It goes on and on. Their profile says they read a lot you read something into that and don’t write. They write liberal and you think hippy and don’t write.
I don’t know what the solution is but the solution is NOT rejecting more people based on their criteria. The solution has to involve some other way to get people talking and meeting easier without all the superficial criteria that would never filter people in real life. Filters that honestly don’t matter in real life. That IMO is the #1 reason they don’t work.
#2 might be too many AHOLE men just looking for sex. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. It would just be nice if you could some how separate the people looking to just hook up from the people looking for relationships.
#3 is that pictures lie which you mentioned. But I think the problem is not that people post old pictures or pictures that are too beautiful. I think it’s that only some people are photogenic. Many people who you’d find relatively attractive look horrible in their pictures. I’ll bet you see tons of fairly attractive people in the real world how have poor pictures online. I don’t know if video would solve that. It would add new problems like lighting, sound, interview skills, etc but it might at least solve the photo problem.
I agree on all your points – but for #1 I think Circl.es is actually advantaged because the filtering is minimal. There is no personality test. The settings by default are open – and those that you must choose are objective (such as age, or religion if that matters to someone). These are things that should be filtered.
Looking at a public Facebook profile, you can glean a pretty good image of someone – if they have mutual friends, if they have connections to places you are connected to (schools, hometown)…. but there isn’t some sort of metric of compatibility or a chart showing things that are in common or different – it is much more holistic. I think (and hope!) that this appeals to some people.
All that seems nice, but it’s not the first time I read that. Everybody seems to think that writing a new software will solve all the problems. No, you won’t. You still have the empty-disco-problem to solve first, like every other social community or market place. You need to get a lot of people to come to your site. And in the beginning there is no natural reason to come. On your site there is nobody, so who should I date there? You see the problem? How do u attempt to solve that problem? If you can’t solve that, don’t talk big about online dating.
I get this comment a lot but I don’t think there is an easy answer. You have to take a novel spin on an idea and just hope you can convince enough people to give it a try. If you do something obnoxious like spamming Facebook, you are taking advantage of your existing users, and that’s a bad strategy for the long term.
Every new user gets a welcome email that says, “hey, this is brand new and not many people are on it yet, but if you like the idea please hang around and see if it works.” If you can get enough people to do this, eventually you can build up a userbase (hopefully!).
Online dating doesn’t work unless your looking for something very specific of desperate. Even then you have to be willing to put a lot of time, effort and probally money.
The problem is men are generally driven by looks initially and usually have very different motives for being on the sites. They generally learn that its a numbers game and bombard anyone who is remotely attractive to them. They struggle to get any feedback positive or negative.
Women get bombared by hundreds of messages, especially attractive ones. Men also lie about who and what they are. Leaving them overwhelmed and usually disappointed.
Generally speaking dating sites get it wrong because the pool of people they feed from is too large. They’re matching techniques are arbitary and they encourage fake profiles and fake interactions.
They fail to represent how human courtship truly works. We generally socialize in social groups of status. Dating sites make no attempt to limit who can contact who.
I mean who would send a girl an email as first contact?!! its just creepy.
how does one unsubscribe or delete their profile?
bottom of the Criteria page – in grey
have worked in this field for years, tried all above approaches and not work. i guess there are certain categories just won’t work on internet.
a practical-unsolvable problem is user acquisition. to better serve existing users you need to acquire new users in a rapid pace. existing users hate “viral” approach. who wants his/her friends to know he/she is such a loser has to use a dating site? without new users there is no way to fullfil the demands of old users. btw, it’s where the “fake accounts” kicks in.
my theory is that human relationships are by-product in nature. any mature, reasonable person doesn’t date for date. they discover someone interesting when they do something meaningful together, then start dating. not the other way around.
I don’t think online dating is broken. As long as you don’t take it too seriously I’ve had some great fun with okcupid and POF.
Does Circl.es only find matches that are also Circl.es users or can you search through the open profiles of everyone in your area?
there was a popular app called Are You Interested? in fb’s early days which pretty much did the same thing. You seemed to have moved it on to a separate domain but still piggybacking on social graph. circl.es does look a lot better though.
good luck.
I dont think online sucks. I have had complete success. All I want to do is date and ive been on many dates from http://www.YouHadMeAtHello.com. I really like it cause its free. Check it out.
Very similar idea to egat we tried to do at kimonata.com and failed.
Pingback: 2011 « Hoehn’s Musings
You’ve cracked it man. Seriously! Well done! Though one thing, you need to solve the chicken-egg problem of trying to get users onto your website. Most people are awkward about sharing information about a dating site on their profile. So maybe thats something you could work on. Like how to get people onto the website without people having to update their statuses about it(circl.es i.e).
thanks – i don’t know if i cracked it but we’ll see. you are right on the chicken-and-egg thing…. i’m not sure there is any silver bullet but i took a stab at thinking about it here: http://circlesblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/why-its-hard-to-launch-dating-websites/
reposted on thebitterbabe.wordpress.com
Online dating: far too much competition. You’d better have skin as thick as an alligator to deal with the rejection, even from seemingly ‘average’ women.
In fact, I’ve had to lower my standards just for the hope of receiving a reply from a woman. That’s how desperate I was becoming to even get an opportunity to converse with a member of the opposite sex. Rather sad, so I stepped back and thought, hey what’s going on here.
Well, when women receive dozens upon dozen of emails, they develop an over inflated sense of self worth. I can’t stress this enough: the online atmosphere is not indicative of reality at all.
I hate to state numbers for attractiveness, but for the sake of argument: I would typically do well with women in the 7-8 / 10 category. That’s a fair representation of my own attractiveness. I was astounded by the responses or lack there of, from my typical target range. I’m led to believe that unless you are drop dead hot guy, you don’t stand a chance. Or more likely, many of these women don’t have much to offer in the real world, thus they’re killing time online out of boredom before going to bed. It’s a confidence booster, with little no intention of going out to meet people, for whatever reasons.
Now, I should mention I have met a couple attractive, well educated/established women (read: not a gold-digger or waste of space). So it is possible, yet the time/effort required on your part is astounding.
For my own sanity and sense of self-worth, I’ve decided it’s just not a suitable dating environment. It’s time to put out the word to coworkers, friends and family that I’m single and looking. I’d have a better chance of meeting someone compatible.
I don’t see how this is better, so you set up a profile on Facebook which is full of security problems,create a network of friends and family, then start dating.
1)What happens if you get a stalker, they now have access to your friends and family.
2)What happens if you reject them, now they have access to your friends and family, to make you life hell.
I made the mistake of letting one date have my Facebook, and that was hell. There is always someone who knows someone, so this person will never go away.
Bad Idea
P.S.
I don’t see why you have a problem, with the I saw your picture lets meet up thing.
That’s no different then going to a bar and sparking a conversation. Its just with online there is no easy way of doing it.
(1)Stop using online dating websites.
(2)Stop using Facebook or any other ‘social’ media for purposes of dating.
Reason: People embellish the truth more so online, than offline – in-person. They want to look their absolute best, so they include false information in their profiles or spend hours trying to take the perfect photographs.
You feel like you’re being interrogated with 20 questions if or when you strike up a conversation.
Here’s an example, when I did online dating I met a couple women that looked great in their photographs, yet when I met them they were….obese and quite frumpy looking. I was very disappointed to say the least and cut those dates short.
You waste hours emailing or texting some complete stranger, who’s voice you may not even like when you meet.
It’s not all bad, as I had some decent experiences. Although today, the competition is so fierce, that your profile and pictures better be perfect, or you may get passed over quickly.
Imagine a woman receiving 10-15+ emails a day from prospective guys. She has to sort through these and as we know, that’s really time consuming, especially after a long day at work or school. Point being, online dating is much harder than it looks, for men anyway due to excess competition.
Solution: there are alternatives. Be active and go out and find them. There’s got to be someone you know, who has a friend of a friend who’s single.