3 ms·

Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea. This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way of harvesting email a

by crux_ 16y ago

Counterpoint to a lot of folks here: I don't like the idea. This sort of thing has been around for a very very long time, mainly as a way of harvesting email addresses to spam. I remember receiving an email "crush" that is exactly this as early as 1999. How is this different at all?

hobonumber1 16y ago
I think you are misunderstanding the concept. We don't want to spam you at all. Our goal is to improve matchmaking by bringing in the social graph. We are talking friend-to-friend matchmaking here. Its anonymous and there is a degree of trust between mutual friends. That wasn't there in 1999. There was only web + email. There was no social graph.
- crux_ 16y ago
  Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to act on an attraction.) Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier and removed some of the manual data entry. The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to unsolicited bulk email operations. Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.
  - jayzee 16y ago
    Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product. That is a criticism not only of this start-up but all other start-ups where you are not paying a subscription fee. If you are not paying then you are not the customer, you are a part of the product.

by crux_ 16y ago

hobonumber1 16y ago

I think you are misunderstanding the concept. We don't want to spam you at all. Our goal is to improve matchmaking by bringing in the social graph. We are talking friend-to-friend matchmaking here. Its anonymous and there is a degree of trust between mutual friends. That wasn't there in 1999. There was only web + email. There was no social graph.

crux_ 16y ago
Me being a curmudgeon: I'd actually say that the narrow technocratic definitions imposed by the "social graph" lead to generally _less social_ results. (For an example close at hand, I believe that I did an awful lot of growing up by confronting fears of rejection and learning to act on an attraction.) Me responding to your points: Of course there was a social graph, it just wasn't reified in a database. Here's how it worked: You got an email saying someone had a crush on you. Curious to see who it was, you then entered all your friends & classmates email addresses in to see if there was a match. Not a whit of difference in what's actually happening; you've just made it shinier and removed some of the manual data entry. The "Step 3: ??? that comes before Step 4: profit" was, of course, that all your friends now received "someone has a crush on you!" emails too, and the marketer running the site had a nice fat verified mailing list to sell to unsolicited bulk email operations. Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product.
- jayzee 16y ago
  Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, but I cannot see a way for you to run this as a profitable business without similarly turning the 'users' into the product. That is a criticism not only of this start-up but all other start-ups where you are not paying a subscription fee. If you are not paying then you are not the customer, you are a part of the product.