Monday, November 5, 2012

Online Dating Industry NOV 2012 State of the Art


WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites but no one is using the 16PF5 to assess personality of its members!
WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites but no one calculates similarity with a quantized pattern comparison method!
WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites but no one can show Compatibility Distribution Curves to each and every of its members!
WorldWide, there are over 5,000 -five thousand- online dating sites but no one is scientifically proven!

Online Dating for serious daters is performing as a Big Online Casino, with low successful rates.
Traffic of paid dating sites declined sharply since 2010 and continues (eHarmony, Chemistry, etc).
Lack Of Innovation & Decadence can summarize the Online Dating Industry since years.
The Online Dating Industry is performing like the Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Industry before the USA Food and Drug Administration was created. There is no Legislation, no ID verification, low reliable background checks, no Quality Norms, except for Shaadi. No online dating site is Scientifically Proven.
Worldwide there are less than 7 million paid members (adding up all the ones at eHarmony, Match, Chemistry, Meetic, MeeticAffinity, OkCupid, PeopleMedia's Communities, PlentyOfFish, Parship/eCift, etc). The market remains enormous for new players.
Online Dating for serious daters does not need to be more social, it needs to be more effective, more efficient.

The biggest scammers in the Online Dating Industry are not from Ghana or Nigeria because they are precisely marketing executives from big sites. They use credit card billing trickery, automatic rebilling.
eHarmony Brazil failed because NO ONE uses credit cards in South America, they pay in cash or using debit cards in one-time transaction. eHarmony Japan never launched, it was a bluff in order to sell all eHarmony Inc.' s properties to IAC for USD 1Billion, but the deal was never done.
The Online Dating Industry needs to kill the Matchmaking Industry. There is no room for both, like computers killed typewriters, but now C-Level executives are more worried about their golf scores than their company's long term strategy and innovations.
The Online Dating Industry needs Innovations!!! But innovations are not adding more bells and whistles to actual online dating sites. Or launching new ones with the same stupidities as the old ones saying “the first dating social network”.

ONLY ONE ROAD TO ACHIEVE INNOVATIONS  The Online Dating Industry needs Innovations, but the innovations the Online Dating Industry needs will come from only one source: the latest discoveries in theories of romantic relationships development with commitment. Only 3 major discoveries can help to revolutionize the online dating industry.
I) Several studies showing contraceptive pills users make different mate choices, on average, compared to non-users. "Only short-term but not long-term partner preferences tend to vary with the menstrual cycle"
II) People often report partner preferences that are not compatible with their choices in real life. (Behavioural recommender systems  or other system that learns your preferences are rubbish, useless at all for serious online dating)
III) What is important in attracting people to one another may not be important in making couples happy. Compatibility is all about a high level on personality similarity between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.

Personality Based Recommender Systems are the next generation of recommender systems because they perform FAR better than Behavioural ones (past actions and pattern of personal preferences)
That is the only way to improve recommender systems, to include the personality traits of their users.

Actual online dating sites offering compatibility matching methods are only fueled by big marketing budgets and not by serious scientific evidence. No one (eHarmony, Chemistry, PerfectMatch, PlentyOfFish Chemistry Predictor, MeeticAffinity, Be2, RewardingLove, Parship/eCift, True, etc) can prove its matching algorithm can match prospective partners who will have more stable and satisfying relationships than couples matched by chance, astrological destiny, personal preferences, searching on one's own, or other technique as the control group in a peer_reviewed Scientific Paper. They are all like placebo, because
* Actual online dating sites offering compatibility matching methods, when calculating compatibility between prospective mates, have less or at least the same precision as searching on one's own. [in the range of 3 or 4 persons compatible per 1,000 persons screened]
* That is because they use:
a) simplified versions of personality traits, instead of the 16PF5 or similar with the complete inventory (16 variables)
b) inadequate quantitative methods to calculate compatibility between prospective mates, like eHarmony which uses Dyadic Adjustment Scale or other sites which use multivariate linear / logistic regression equations o other equations.

Latest Research in Theories of Romantic Relationships Development shows: compatibility is all about a high level on personality* similarity* between prospective mates for long term mating with commitment.
*personality measured with a normative test.
*similarity: there are different ways to calculate similarity, it depends on how mathematically is defined.

I had reviewed over 55 compatibility matching engines intended for serious dating since 2003, when I had discovered "the online dating sound barrier" problem.

Breaking "the online dating sound barrier" is to achieve at least:
3 most compatible persons in a 100,000 persons database.
12 most compatible persons in a 1,000,000 persons database.
48 most compatible persons in a 10,000,000 persons database.
100 times better than Compatibility Matching Algorithms used by actual online dating sites!

The only way to achieve that is:
- using the 16PF5 normative personality test, available in different languages to assess personality of members, or a proprietary test with exactly the same traits of the 16PF5.
The ensemble of the 16PF5 is: 10E16, big number as All World Population is nearly 7.0 * 10E9
- expressing compatibility with eight decimals, like The pattern 6.7.6.8.9.6.7.7.8.7.2.5.8.7.3.4 is 92.55033557% +/- 0.00000001% similar to the pattern 7.7.6.8.8.7.6.5.8.7.4.5.7.7.3.4
Using a quantized pattern comparison method (part of pattern recognition by cross-correlation) to calculate similarity between prospective mates.

That is the only way to revolutionize the Online Dating Industry.

All other proposals are .............. NOISE



Match's Team is secretely testing a new compatibility matching algorithm using the 16PF5 test, to replace Chemistry, a 7+ years old and obsolete site.
I will be posting screenshots and insightful comments soon. I had also challenged them to offer Compatibility Distribution Curves for each and every dater, i.e. how compatible you are with the rest of the daters.

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