How About We Disrupt Online Dating
thestartupfoundry.com
thestartupfoundry.com
Then I see the author is something called the "chief advocate" at a company who offers "entrepreneur advocacy" services. I'm not 100% sure what that is but I'm pretty confident it's just a marketing and/or PR firm that pitches itself to startups. Nothing bad about that per se, but let's keep pg's "Submarine" article in mind here.
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
If startups are paying for this kind of work, then it tells me the "PR & marketing services for startups" is the REAL industry that is ripe for disruption.
Crowd sourced news like HN is already starting to disrupt that industry. In many ways, this is a win-win - the existing HN content evaluation makes the more content-filled submissions rise to the top, and blogs can just pluck the ones they want and report it as news to a wider audience. That said, there's definitely still a lot of stupid money floating around that space for people willing to make something new and interesting.
My idea uses a more social approach, have people tag those they're already interested in (friends or acquaintances) and notify both parties if and only if there is a mutual interest (both groups tag each other), otherwise wait.
This method is 'rejection free' and solves many of the problems associated with dating in a way that incentives users to reveal their true interests.
I want to localize it to colleges only at first so there already exists a somewhat 'trusted' community. I think this idea solves a lot of the problems commonly associated with dating.
for better or worse, there is still some social stigma attached to finding people to date online. the crowd who decides that's not enough to stop them is on match and okc. the new-comers that the article wants won't come, at least in part, due to that social stigma.
grubwith.us is the right answer here: make dating not about dating, but only one instance of what the product does: help people find other people to hang out with in a cool, non-committal way. i'm sure there are other concepts similar to grubwith.us worth exploring.
One of the issues I had with sites like Match or okCupid was gender bias. Men get few messages from women and women get overwhelmed with the messages from men. My solution to this was to add a moderator (the public) to recommend and filter potential matches and who you can message.
Also, marriage oriented or dating sites for single ethnic groups often do the same (or have no gallery at all till registration).