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Personally I think the whole eHarmony model is dead (or dying). I'm interested in people's social interactions and how that is changing with new people growing

Personally I think the whole eHarmony model is dead (or dying). I'm interested in people's social interactions and how that is changing with new people growing up with no digital prejudices against technology. I believe social networking replaces traditional online dating. Especially the younger you get the more true this is. The eHarmony model tends to prosper over inflation of the details you put down. Okay so the trend that I see happening in younger people is that traditionally Myspace actually took this space for finding new friends online with people under 18 (non-tech). Facebook has a social contract that you typically have to meet the person or heavily been in a person's social circle before becoming friends on facebook. The site currently ruling making new friends online is Dailybooth and YouTube which is immerensly popular with under 21s. Not only do participants make "online friends" they usually translate into offline friends. I have personally observed a high percentage rate of meetups and "gatherings" with both these communities. So what makes Dailybooth popular with making new friends. 1) Use of actual photos of the person on a dailyish basis: This allows for people to follow people that they would be generally interested in hanging out with. The use of images from a webcam also means that you can verify the person, that they are real, and again images are a very powerful tool in considering if you'll like the person or not. 2) The details on dailybooth has the standard social networking info and also the location. Dailybooth users when they gather or meet up with one another they tend to take a booth/photo of the meetup each tagging the other people. This drives other people to meetup in groups. ------------ In consideration of an algorithm I've been meaning to pitch Dailybooth on an idea to populate a user's photo stream with people that you can calculate based on the network graph of who the user has followed/followed back. And based on location, to try and increase the percentage of people making offline friends using the service. Which decreases churn rate and brand value. So yeah, I'm heavily researching this area right now so if you interested in discussing it further my details are on http://benreyes.com http://benreyes.com I could talk about this topic for days.

sendos 16y ago
Interesting stuff, but you mention under-21s. I think this age group never has that much trouble meeting friends, since they are still in school, see a lot of people, maybe are less picky than older people in who they interact with, etc. So, historically, there isn't much need for a website for under-21s to find friends, but maybe this is not the case with today's youth. I may be wrong here, but I think any site that would want to attack this problem and find enough people who would use it would have to do it for people who are older than 21, maybe people above 25 or 30? These are the people who move to new cities because of a new job, or move into a new neighborhood because they bought a house, etc

sendos 16y ago

Interesting stuff, but you mention under-21s. I think this age group never has that much trouble meeting friends, since they are still in school, see a lot of people, maybe are less picky than older people in who they interact with, etc. So, historically, there isn't much need for a website for under-21s to find friends, but maybe this is not the case with today's youth. I may be wrong here, but I think any site that would want to attack this problem and find enough people who would use it would have to do it for people who are older than 21, maybe people above 25 or 30? These are the people who move to new cities because of a new job, or move into a new neighborhood because they bought a house, etc