Think about online dating for a second. Even if you’ve never done it, you probably know a little about how it works. You create a profile (the bait), and you basically start fishing. Most sites make you pay a subscription fee, and some don’t.
It’s all pretty simple, and it hasn’t changed in 15 years. More or less zero innovation in this space, save for a few nutty angles on the whole thing.
Over the past few months, I’d been thinking about how online dating could be made better. Or at least more interesting. And here is where my mind was going.
- Online dating is pretty socially acceptable these days, but there are still a lot of people that have some trepidation about the whole thing. So how do you get around the social stigma that holds people back from getting into online dating?
- I also thought about all of my female friends, who aren’t single, but who LOVE playing matchmaker and setting people up. How could you get those people involved? If you could get not just the single people, but ALL people involved (in the broaden-your-potential-market sense), the size and scale here gets a lot more interesting.
- And in the offline world, the best way to meet someone, is to be introduced through a mutual friend. Someone that can vouch for both parties and clear that transaction so to speak. How could that trusted offline experience be re-created online?
- Which led me to think about an online dating site, that was more of a “game” than a dating site in the traditional sense.
- How could you introduce game mechanics whereby matchERS could be rewarded for successfully connecting matchEES?
- And by making it a game, where the single people (or matchEES) were passive users that were being matched up by other users, rather than actively fishing, it seemed to take a little of the social sting out of the whole process.
ANYWAYS…
Today I stumbled upon an ad for “The Matching Game“. The ad simply showed me two pictures and asked me to click to vote if I thought these two people should date. Out of curiosity, I clicked through, and was instantly thrown into a very simple, very slick little voting interface that allowed me to vote on who I thought would or would not be a good match.
And after I voted on the requisite number of couples, my results were displayed, along with an indication of how well I had done in predicting compatibility.
I love this concept, and I am glad to see someone was thinking similarly about this.