1. They’re a Christian Fundamentalist organization

Despite their attempts to portray founder, Dr. Neil Clark Warren, as a friendly cross between Yoda and Father Christmas, eHarmony is a company that got its break during appearances in “Focus on the Family” radio broadcasts. Dr. Warren likes making money more than he like’s defending James Dobson, so his conservative right-wing ideology is varnished over on the eHarmony site, but that doesn’t mean you can pretend your subscription money isn’t being used to fund school sponsored prayer, corporal punishment, homophobia and pro-life lobbying – fine if you agree but worth noting if you don’t.

That also meand they don’t want your business is you’re depressed, have been married more than twice, are an atheist or are gay (yes, they run “Compatible Sodomites Partners, no they don’t want to.) Dr. Warren has said “…here are six places in the Bible that say homosexuality is wrong.” only to continue, “On the other hand, in the Old Testament if you work on the Sabbath day and you’re guilty, then you should be shot.” (I think he means stoned, given it’s the Old Testament he quoting, not Guns and Ammo).

You will be judged and no, eHarmony is not offline on Sundays (run Dr. Warren! Run!)

2. They’re lying about those ’29 dimensions of compatibility’

Though Dr. Warren has a PhD in psychology, it doesn’t mean he’s incapable of using any perceived authority to legitimize pseudo-scientific claptrap he’s plucked out of the air. eHarmony loudly claims to base its matching algorithm on science and research, while failing to publish any of the science they claim to be charging for. Does anyone know what these ’29 dimensions’ are because Dr. Warren’s not telling and it’s a logical place to start?

Worse still, the site design itself makes it obvious they’re using nothing more sophisticated than a comparison, and a bubble-sort, to make matches. With an algorithm which requires 258 data-points to work, and that’s how many questions they ask each member, how clever can it be? Doesn’t asking anyone 258 questions give you a reasonable chance at matching them with a person they may like?

There’s no ‘secret science’ I’m aware of that doesn’t involve Nazi’s and time-travel, but we’re being asked to believe, or have faith, there’s a lot of clever stuff being done for our own good eHarmony can’t tell us about it. It’s rubbish. Science is public by definition, if you can’t review the findings you can’t claim it’s real. Isn’t it wrong to claim you’re doing ‘scientific matching’ if you haven’t proved your system scientifically, or that there’s any real science in it?

3. They don’t want you to fall in love

eHarmony gets a lot of press for the claim it’s responsible for 2% of US weddings. The numbers are hard to check because they come from a Harris Interactive poll paid for by eHarmony (no conflict there), and the raw data’s not been made available to the public. You could say Dr. Neil Clark Warren is the man behind 1% of American divorces of course, but that’s less marketable.

Even if those numbers hold-up you have to ask what they mean. If you appeal to conservative Christians who don’t believe in sex before marriage, you’re going to corral a self-selecting group of users eager to marry. In fact you will combine the ingredients necessary for marriages doomed to fail, desperation, sexual frustration and unrealistic expectations. Unsurprisingly – eHarmony doesn’t provide data on their marriages longevity, presumably because they don’t care, or don’t want us to know the truth. Either way, numbers of marriages entered into by itself can’t be seen as a measure of dating-site success. A marriage that ends after a year isn’t a more long-term relationship than dating for a year but by talking endlessly about marriage long-term success is implied.

More tellingly, when you join eHarmony they only allow you to communicate with people who’ve also bought memberships. If they really wanted to give you the best chance of a match, why not introduce paying members to non-paying members if they’re found to be compatible? Instead they demand payment form everyone involved, as if the most important dimension of compatibility is having a credit card on file with eHarmony.

If their matching algorithm was brilliant, most people would meet life-mates within a few dates and you’d see rapid turn-over and consistently low membership numbers. It would be a hard place to stay single (don’t forget, they won’t let you join if they don’t approve of your character). When you look at the site, neither is true. Joining eHarmony costs $60 a month, and their best customers are the ones who stay active longest (which is true of all subscription sites). They make money sending single people on unsuccessful dates.

Buyer beware.

One of the last decisions we’re making as we prepare Vooji for public consumptions is how large to make our video files. Like everyone since YouTube we’re using Adobe Flash to deliver our video, but unlike most we have a little space to be creative.

For years video sites have been more concerned with how much space they’d need to store files, and the ability of their users to download them, than picture quality. Storage is cheaper every day and, as Vooji’s video clips will all be two minutes or less, we can guarantee that even the largest files will download and play in seconds to anyone with a broadband web connection.

Thanks to that, and because we’re starting from scratch, we can deliver video that looks as good as regular TV. The question is should we?

I know I’d be swayed by smooth, crisp, block-free video – especially in a dating context – but would you? Would you wait a few seconds more for quality, or are you happier with cubist renderings (as found everywhere) delivered slightly faster? As there’s no way to make the best stuff as quick to deliver as the crappy stuff it’s a zero-sum game.

All those with dial-up modems, Pentium processors, or strong opinions speak now (or forever hold your peace).

Early on in Vooji’s development I decided to eliminate ‘race’ as a piece of metadata.

The first and most obvious reason for doing so is that it doesn’t mean anything. Ask a scientist and most, accepting a few dressed like ghosts, will tell you that the concepts of nationality and race were deliberately backed with dubious ’science’ in the 1900’s and promoted for political reasons. The British wanted to be biologically different from the people they colonized so badly they made it a “fact”.

Over time the fine-grained races beloved of phrenologists and YouTube commenters have faded into black, white, yellow, brown and red, which are still silly when you begin to examine them. Vague tendencies in groups don’t define race. I.e. if you say “Africans are more prone to Sickle Cell Anemia” are African’s without that gene not Black? Of course not, but what is “blackness?” If it’s a skintone and a manner of being then Colin Powell’s not black. If it’s a birthplace there are no blacks in America. If it’s a way of thinking what’s up with Condoleeza Rice? If it’s about curly hair – c’mon. Seriously? Let’s talk about Jerry Seinfeld. As soon as you start trying to write rules for racial classification you discover we all inhabit races of one.

Then there’s the social issue. If racism is defined as making decisions about individual based on assumptions about groups, just mentioning race is harmful. We all have inbuilt acquired stereotypes and fighting them is what keeps us decent. People who say “I’m no racist, I’m just not attracted to…” are racists by definition, while guys who don’t consider themselves as “down with the brown”, but would have no problem dating Halle Berry or the female lead in Slumdog Millionaire are confused. Am I doing anyone a favor by making it easy for their assumptions to ruin their chances of meeting someone great? Am I doing anyone a favor by putting them in a ghetto based on other people’s assumptions?

Finally there’s practicality. Even if you think race is real, as it’s a label people give themselves you’re a victim of their whims. You, and I, can choose to be any race I desire. Asking one person to define it as you see it is wishful thinking.

So there won’t be any racial categories on Vooji. Let me know if you’re somehow offended…

Markus Frind, founder of PlentyOfFish, recently posted some interesting statistics about his users age and income. He reveals they’re older and richer than those on other sites, and because of that believes he’ll ride-out the recession better than his competitors. Markus says he’s not sure why his stats skew that way.

I have three reasons:

1. Older people tend to be richer than younger people. Extrapolating a higher-than average income from an older-than average user-base is as obvious and misleading as it’s true.
2. Younger people tend to be more sensitve to good design and are therefore less likely to join a site that looks as basic/rough on first glance as PlentyOfFish.
3. PlentyOfFish’s selling points are its size, its cost (free) and its features. The cost doesn’t impress the young (Facebook’s free and much better featured), the size isn’t impressive (everyone under 25’s on Facebook or MySpace already) and, like its design, PlentyOfFish’s feature set is dated. For older people these things aren’t true. If you’re over 45 you’re more likely to meet someone you know at PlentyOfFish than at MySpace, you probably don’t care if PlentyOfFish has video streaming and a mobile app, and you’re sensitive to cost because the best free sites (social networks) don’t work well for you. So older people choose dating sites based on size and cost and the biggest, cheapest dating site is PlentyOfFish.

This argument seems far more plausible than the contention that PlentyOfFish has some mystical ‘value’ only an elite band of wealthy people are sensitive to. Anyone care to disagree?

It’s hard to know if “Till Death Do Us Part“, a new dating site aimed at people living with terminal illness, has much of a future. Reading the profiles is maudlin and left me feeling like a one-man make-a-wish foundation. While HIV+ dating services have been a minor success, thanks to modern medicine, HIV’s no longer a death sentence for most people in the West, more a serious condition that requires management. Till Death Do Us Part is less positive, a place to meet someone you know you’re going to lose.

As a public service I think it’s noble, but most people looking directly at the end of their life will seek solace with those they already know. As a way to bring sexuality to the sick it’s a public service, but I’d imagine most people without contagious conditions will simply have flings in forums which aren’t so upfront about illness. As a joke, I think it’s sick.

The likelihood a site like this will just attract inheritance vultures and other undesirables seems high. As many sites, including Vooji, allow people to tag their profiles with any keyword, including their health status, is a niche like this redundant compared to a more general site with a bigger audience? Am I missing something? Does anyone see this as a brilliant move?

It’s odd to be writing a blog post whose only guaranteed reader is me, but as that should soon change, I’ll shout into the void and pretend I’m not talking to myself.

Hello. My name’s Samuel Agboola, and I’m the guy who decided the world needs another dating site.

If, after reading that, you’re trying to resist the urge to put a gun in your mouth keep reading. This blog will explain why a different type of dating site is a good idea, and provide advice and commentary on dating online and off.

Regarding the royal ‘we’ I’m throwing around, aside from myself we have a small programming team in New Dehli (Hello Binu), my co-founders in Long Beach and me in Los Angeles. My co-founders run a couple of other successful business’, which share nothing in common with Vooji but their skills and a giant-slaying attitude.

As I write this, we’re a few weeks from a public Beta. We completed a proof-of-concept alpha at the start of February, and are working hard on tying up loose ends. If you want to be first in line to see Vooji, click the link at the top of the page and request a Beta invite (this will be a real Beta – we’re not going to use the ‘beta’ moniker as an excuse for running a barely functioning site for years on end.)

Our aim is to make meeting people online as fast, and simple, as pulling a result from Google. Impossible, of course, but worth pursuing.

It’s easy to contact people you know online instantly, via email, IM, Twitter etc. but meeting someone new takes days, or weeks, via dating sites and social networks. On the web conversations that take minutes in person take days. When it comes to chemistry, intimacy, and romance a picture is worth a thousand words (and a video-feed delivers 30 pictures per second.)

Recently, video-based speed-dating sites have become popular, but they generally require you to jump through hoops before you actually get 1-on-1 with someone.  They’re dating sites with video added, and based on the speed-dating model which is complicated and artificial (who prefers to talk to people they like for three minute sessions?) We think there’s a better solution.

When the great Lotus designer Colin Chapman was asked how to make a car faster, he replied, “Add less weight”, and that’s what we’ve done. We’ve looked at all the dating options online and removed the barriers which complicate and slow them down.

Registration barriers? Gone – why force someone to register? Payment barriers? Gone. Who pays for stuff online anymore anyway? Complicated forms and quizzes? Gone. Just record a message and go. Filling your inbox with crud? Gone. You don’t want us to email you? Ever? No problem. We’ve built an online meeting point that’s as simple, fast and anonymous as approaching someone at a party (unless you’re used to approaching people at parties with a list of the last three books you read and a thumbnail).

Subscribe to our feed if you’d like to know more. We’ve only just begun.

(Photo by Exfordy)