Comment by petesalty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petesalty | Hacker News Reader

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I've been thinking about something like this for the last few months. I think the mobile element is a great idea, and a very nice ice breaker - "Hey there, I'm Trent415 and superdate.com said you and I have a lot in common." Plus, you could determine if there was a mutual friend close by to introduce you. I also think there needs to be a wed based version that isn't location based, but I do like the mobile idea a lot.

I think the problem with dating sites at the moment is that they make it easy to lie. If you've ever used Match.com, or something similar, the dates tend to end up poorly because one person who claimed to be into music listens to the radio on the way to work, while the other person who claims to be into music has a Masters from the Royal Academy of Music, has played in professional symphonies and spends eight hours a day practicing. Also, that is NOT and athletic build.

Now, if you monitoring their streams (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, whatever), you could determine what they liked, where they went and who they knew. I suspect this is way better way to form meaningful connections (it's how I found the love of my life). And if you're just looking for a random hookup there's always craigslist.

I've been looking for a co-founder for the Y Combintor summer 2010 session - http://ineedacofounder.wordpress.com - so if you're interested hit me back and maybe we could team up.

http://thread.com/ is also in this space, though in a different fashion. It integrates with Facebook to get info, but appears that it also limits you to requesting dates within your social graph (friends of friends of friends, etc).

I like http://ge.la.to and their take on this better than Thread, but I'm not entirely confident in their execution. Several aspects of the site didn't work for me and I think the need to fine tune their data mining algorithms. A profile's most recently/often talked about topics should not include "ff" and "rt" from Twitter. ;)

The concept of monitoring social site streams for dating/authenticity purposes reminds me of a site I heard about recently, http://ge.la.to/

There are many sites struggling to gain traction in mobile aspects of dating, and the problem is likely that it's difficult to get a critical mass of users set up before using the feature is appealing.

Regardless, I'm not aware of anyone who has put all this together successfully. Dating (in many aspects, but surely online) has shown itself to be a tough nut to crack.

Yeah, I've looked at ge.la.to, and it's kind of similar with what I have in mind, although they don't really seem to do a lot of stream analysis (I could be wrong on this).

You're completely right, it's a hard nut to crack, and gaining traction will be tricky, which is why I'd probably just start in a few major cities first, or maybe just go after one vertical - think JDate but maybe for the younger/tech crowd.

Actually, I think that one of the big problems with dating businesses is that if you're doing a great job you actually loose customers. This may be why no one does a very good job of it.

yes, this is the premise of http://ge.la.to. Wait until you see our recommendation/compatibility engine. It's going to be awesome.

Steve, just a heads up, I'm running through a few things on ge.la.to and it's super slow/crashy. Just thought you'd like to know.

Cool, I hope it works out for you guys.

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