Match.com no longer top dating site, sends in the lawyers
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
plentyoffish.wordpress.com
If you read the letter Match.com sent to him, you will see that he is misrepresenting it here. All they ask him for is proof that the claims he is making are true.
From Match.com: > We demand that you immediately cease and desist from making these false claims. If your position is that these claims are substantiated, please promptly provide me with substantiation for each of these claims...If disclosing the substantiation data concerns you, Match.com is open to entering into a confidentiality agreement.
I don't know why Match.com would be the people to follow up on a possible false advertising claim like this. I assume they could sue plentyoffish if they don't provide Match with evidence? As plentyoffish points out, it is likely that Match.com (also?) makes false claims, so this could definitely be bluster. But they definitely don't ask for plentyoffish to reveal their processes.
False advertising is illegal.
Based on *my* knowledge of the industry, these claims cannot be supported.... [emphasis added]
In any case, this is just meaningless legal posturing. In the United States, where anyone can bring suit against any private entity for any reason whatsoever, a C&D letter from a competitor like this would barely register on my radar screen if I were one of the people at plentyoffish who's paid to worry about such things. Judging by the last sentence of his post, that seems like exactly what the post author is going to do about it.
The absence of a button is a feature.
"What you say!??! You can't be more popular then we!! We demand that you prove this to us."
Do they really think someone will be fooled by their demands which have no force behind them?
My personal experience suggests it's ridiculously common. People who work in large corporations often feel that the way large corporations work is the only way to do business.
Because of that, they simply look at all the resources they require and conclude that since they require this, that there must be no other way of doing things.
This is why startups can succeed - large businesses are stuck inside the boxes of their own design.
Unlike Mint (pre-acquisition), Markus already has FU money...
http://techcrunch.com/2009/02/19/quicken-online-cant-believe...
Would anyone in their right minds consider this?
A little experience with queuing models and Petri nets also helps.
As for the queuing models & Petri nets, assuming everyone understood I was a more than a little tongue-in-cheek:
- Setup your net as a cycle between weekdays and weekends. I only use 1 week of forward planning, so my base net is 3 weekdays (I save a few weekdays for non-dating) and 2 weekend days. 5 vertices.
- Duplicate the net for different stages, roughly equating one stage per date sequence number. E.g stage 1 is first date, stage 2 is the second date, etc.
- Each girl is a token.
- Each token in each stage tells you how your day is likely to go, once you equate the stage # to an expected progress level. Especially early on in the dating sequence, dates can be short, so multiple dates can be stacked into a day (e.g. an afternoon 1st date vs a dinner/movie 3rd date that night).
Nothing fancy by any means. Note, again, that this is pretty tongue-in-cheek, but it does help me keep a rational (and semi-quantitative) focus on what is fundamentally a numbers game. I don't lose my cool on dates b/c each one I understand as a single token, instead of freaking out on how this or that girl could be "the one."
Edit: clearly this needs work, but I'll have to look up Petri nets again before tightening this up.
These two problems have the same solution: charge men for membership, women join for free. Every college keg party has figured this out, I'm surprised online dating sites haven't.
You might be right, but I 'm not sure which element is more important: sheer numbers or the quality of the people who have joined.
On a site that men pay but women join for free you're going to find a lot of women who expect men to pay for everything for them, and the only men on that site are going to be the kind who expect to get what they pay for.
Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, everyone's a grownup after all. But that isn't the demographic that match.com et al are after - they measure their success in how many marriages they produce. Marriage-oriented people are also more likely to be at the point in their lives where they have money to spend to, they're a highly desirable market.
The more people on the site who live near to a user, the more likely that user is to find someone compatible with them.
Having said that, "quality" might be important if it's a way of making it likely that users are more compatible with other users, e.g. religious-minded people who want to marry within their religion.
It's not that great for women, either, since they're overwhelmed with contact by large numbers of men.
This hasn't really stopped men from trying, though. The gender ratio doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, all is has to be is not ludicrously out of whack.
I like your thoughts on targeting young professionals, and basing it on an existing network such as LinkedIn also sounds reasonable. Your focus on keeping personal information out of the conversation is not viable - remember, it's not just e-mail and phone numbers, it's also suggestions to meet. I also think that the fee to be hooked up with a second person is going to be a major deterrent.
If your database has 3 millions lines in the account table, it feels better to use that number than the number of accounts that, say, logged in in the past x months. Especially if that second number is way less.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I feel it's one of these games where since everyone is doing it, you have to catch up one way or the other.
They don't need to be copycats to be dumbasses.
There are straightforward, well-used definitions of "user" for which I have 60, 1.5k, 2.9k, 50.0k, and "well over a hundred thousand" users. They're all equally true and none of them singly or in combination tell you a thing about the health of my business unless you're intimately acquainted with it.
:-)
My patented uniques metric: cat access.log | awk -F " " '{ print $1 }' | sort | uniq | wc -l
cut -d ' ' -f 1
It does? Says who? This is your definition of a user. That's fine, but it doesn't extend to being a common one.
Unless of course you delete all the accounts of people that have registered for your service but aren't using it as often as you'd like.
The question is what does "3 million people who use our web-based apps" mean.
A simple truth test: Are there "3 million people who use [their] web-based apps"? Absolutely not. Not under even the most remotely reasonable definition.
What else do you call people who sign-up if not "users"?
They don't say that "2 million people use our apps and all of them signed in yesterday", they're just giving you an idea of the total number of accounts they have in their db.
It's marketing, not horse shit.
How so? Over 75 people have used your toilet.
This is like suggesting that McDonalds' "over xx billion served" mantra is supposed to mean that there are over xx billion customers in their store at any given time.
I'm not sure if that's how you read it, but I certainly don't take the statement that 37s makes to be misleading.
Except that "served" is past tense and "use" is the simple present. If 37signals had said 3 million have "used" their software, this discussion probably wouldn't have kicked off. Instead, they used the present tense, implying that 3 million people routinely and currently use the software, which is highly unlikely.
I might sound like a snob, but I have a hard time taking a site designed like this seriously, I don't care how many users or traffic he claims to have.
As far as dating site designs go, OkCupid looks great.
I'd say he knows his target audience well enough to make that decision himself. There is indeed such a thing as being too polished. The reason late-night TV commercials are cheesy and loud is not because the director lacks the skills but rather because it suits the target market. If POF redesigned their site to look like a glamor magazine website, he might indeed lose a lot of users because they might be intimidated by the design.
Its less than 5 minutes worth of work to fix that.
A lot of people have been saying that Craigslist should have better design, more search options, etc but the site is still popular.
On page 4 it discusses exactly that.
But I agree with you, the design is painful to look at, and usability could be improved a lot. Why he doesn't clean things up a bit is beyond me.
But then, compared to the competitors, POF may not look so pretty, but functionally it is quite good.
If POF's UI was really slick, it might look too commercial for some people.
Through the years we've watched the competition go through one design after another and try all kinds of SEO, but our crappy, framed, obtrusive javascript website still outranks them. The only downside is the constant calls we get from SEO and design firms offering to "help us out".
As many as Craigslist is "loosing," I suspect.
23 leads 3 sales —– 13% conversion ratio – about right.
http://images.google.com/images?q=champagne+popping
The problems are human nature. Lawyering is often childish, uncivilized and brutish, but we are making progress.
It sucks... but everything else we've tried sucks worse.