While reading it, I kept thinking, "We solved that! We don't do that!" and was rather excited that there was some outside insight that Yumbunny is going in the right direction. These are some things that Daniel suggested current sites do.
1. Create random encounters & utilize your pre-exisiting friends. One issue Daniel mentions is
"Technology has to replace those real life chance encounters... What online dating sites do is try to simulate meeting random people who have things in common with you. But what they currently do not do is to take advantage of your already existing social network."
We do exactly that- in fact, that is our very premise. We are more of an introduction service than a dating site. The whole concept revolves around getting your friends and family to match you AND suggest people they see for you. So you're getting connected to random people but through your already existing network. Our future features will make it even easier to get your friends and family in on matching you with other people.
In the process, we also sidestep a big problem in getting friends/family to introduce you in real-life which is the "circle rut" effect where you have a hard meeting people outside of your circle of connections. One of the commenters on Daniel's post mentioned this. The people that pop into your matchmaker widget are, by and large, NOT going to be people you already know. However, your matches are filtered by the people who know you the best- effectively giving your friends a larger and more varied pool from which to match you.
2. Avoid the automatic and make meeting people online more like meeting people in real life. One of the early points Daniel makes is that current dating sites are like walled gardens where you have to pay for entry and a computer does calculations to match you to people it thinks may have things in common with you. He mentions that real-life dating doesn't work that way at all.
"How it certainly doesn’t work is by going into a predefined building - sometimes even with an access fee - and only finding potential partners in there."
Yumbunny doesn't have an access fee. You sign-up (which literally takes less than 2 minutes as you're not bogged down with a million questions and Twitter-like descriptions) and post your matchmaker. Your friends and others match you, and we email you the match reports every week. No fuss, no walled garden. In fact, ANYONE can see your matchmaking widget.
For that matter, you don't even have to be signed-up for Yumbunny! Your friend Jane comes to site and while having fun matching other people, sees someone she thinks would be perfect for you. Jane clicks the "Yum!" button under the person's picture, enters your email address- and bam, you're introduced without even having to be a member of the site.
How many times have you met someone new and thought, "This person would be SO PERFECT for my friend?" That's basically what Yumbunny does, only in an online way. So it acts like introductions do in the real world.
3. Sites need to be easily connected to other social networks. This is where a lot of dating websites (especially ones I saw mentioned in the comments to the blog) really try but miss the mark.
For instance, let's talk about a certain dating service who went on Facebook, bought pre-existing apps, shut down those apps, but then signed the users of those apps up for their service.
What happened was a lot of Facebook users got very angry and this service generated a lot of negative publicity for themselves. I personally know of a few people who complained directly to Facebook about having this app "steal" access and sign them up without their permission. So their plan to inflate their numbers with social networking backfired in an extraordinary way- they killed applications people liked AND signed them up for a service they didn't even want.
Then you have the flipside- dating sites that are exclusively Facebook applications (or MySpace applications, mobile apps, etc) that end up not working very well because of two big flaws: they are limited to the platforms which they are on (so if you don't have a Facebook/Myspace/etc. you're left out of it) and they don't allow for people to participate without installing the application. While lots of people like those applications, a lot of people- especially people who are currently in relationships- are NOT going to want to install a dating application.
Yumbunny is going to interface with other forms of media soon, and utilize these pre-existing networks. But we avoid those two major flaws because we are web-based and we don't make people sign up for or install anything to match or introduce people. Sally can match her friend online all day without every having to so as much give her name. There's no obligation and no exclusion- so everyone can have fun with it and at a level of activity with which they are comfortable.
One of the reasons we started Yumbunny was because we knew there was a better way to bring people together without utilizing the standard dating site formula- which may work for some but doesn't work for a lot of people. It really is energizing to see that someone thinks our concept is a great one without them ever having visited our site.
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