Gelato brings real-time search to online dating | Hacker News Reader

Gelato brings real-time search to online dating

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I tried -- and failed -- to produce a online dating startup. I spent a lot of time reading the academic literature on the matter. Here is my summation:

compatibility ~ attraction + age + sex + serendipity

Serendipity is more appropriately called the error term. In my opinion, real-time news feeds will at best add nothing, if not actually degrading the signal by adding excess noise. You can't date (i.e. appraise compatibility) online. You have to date in "real life".

Then again, that was the premise of my startup, and it failed so maybe i should STFU.

I'm more interested in the kind of stuff a person reads on the internet. If you read similar topics, we're going to have a lot of stuff to talk about, which is attractive to me. There are tons of people on dating sites who I am attracted to and are around my age. You need a filter, and similar interests are easier to express implicitly than writing a huge block of text about all the things you enjoy. That was the premise for a site I worked on (mostly dead for now), though it isn't targeted at dating.

http://sitesincommon.com

Example profile: http://sitesincommon.com/users/niran

I'm never interested in women working in the same profession than I'm working in, having the same views, etc... I don't need someone to acknowledge everything I say. I can do that myself.

I read more on the internet than just tech stuff, and those are interests I'd like to discuss with the people I spend a lot of my time with. What do you plan on talking to someone about if not shared interests?

What heuristic would you use to find people who would complement your views rather than reinforce them? It doesn't sound like an easy problem to solve. Looking at what someone reads does give a good indication of what their views are, but that's not how you have to use it. You can just use it as an indicator of a general interest in politics, for instance.

I don't need someone to acknowledge everything I say.

Then why are you posting this to a social news site?

I tried simple tagging of interests, favorite activities, books, etc. From that, I tried for find clustered similarity. It may have worked -- if i had any users.

What is the "academic literature" for online dating? Is that an established field of research?

im sorry, but this realtime stuff is like web 2.0 overhype on steroids. There's a lot of great products that will come out of it, but there will also be a lot of WTF is going on here products as well.

"it's like friendfeed for dating". People usually go on dating sites to get laid and/or find soulmates, I don't think need real time dating search will make that happen more efficiently.

People usually go on dating sites to get laid and/or find soulmates

I often wonder if this is why most dating sites struggle: most people who are trying to get laid feel they need to at least pretend they are looking for a mate(1) or else they come across as being too crass. This then leads to mismatch between the "I want to get laid soon" and the "I am looking for a long term mate" groups and both end up unsatisfied. It's for just this reason my gut tells me that OnlineBootyCall.com will succeed.

(1) sometimes the unexpected happens and they converge: my wife and I met on Yahoo! Personals about 10 years ago when we were both just looking for a booty call :-)

Indeed. I read the profile in the screenshot, and he says he hates describing himself and then decries how people whose profiles he liked weren't actually like him. Well, yeah. If you don't provide any information about yourself, then you are not going to meet people that are like you.

I am not sure how "real-time search" is going to solve this problem.

(Incidentally, I have started the online dating thing, and I am shocked at how little some people say about themselves. "I like having fun". Wow, let me guess... you have two arms and two legs too!)

Reading the title, the image of the product I got in my mind seemed to be a great idea, a solution to some of the awkwardness that I personally feel toward OK Cupid. I don't want to send an email pretending to take interest in something particular in someone's profile. Bottom line, who's out there, right now, who seems like they are at least potentially interesting? Who wants to meet? "You seem interesting enough, let's just grab a drink." I envisioned something like Twitter, with a more extensive profile. Maybe a Twitter app could do this.

But reading it, this just seems like stalking people before you even know them. Making online dating all the less natural.

"I don't want to send an email pretending to take interest in something particular in someone's profile. "

I don't want to have to pretend to be interested in someone's profile. I want to actually be interested in it, but profiles are hard to write. If pulling information about what you do across the internet leads to an interesting profile, then that seems like a huge gain with zero effort.

If you just want to meet as many possibly interesting people as possible, it sounds like you're looking for http://crazyblinddate.com.

CBD is sortof a hassle. You have to think too much about your schedule, and be ready to be called to a date on short notice. It lost my interest very quickly. If they dropped their overhead I think they would do better, and be close enough to what I had in mind.

Hah. F*ck me. That is roughly the exact implementation of my project from two years ago (even down to the metro area concept). Difference being their site seems to be successful.

I don't think the site is very successful. I tried it once, and there was never anyone else in my area, which is right in the middle of one of their metro areas. They run OKCupid as well, and I'm sure CBD would be more popular (and therefore useful) if they advertised it on the site like they did at the very beginning.

http://ge.la.to

Where is the link?

http://ge.la.to

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