Friday, November 29, 2013

Match under fire, more info about lawsuit Yuliana Avalos

I had never seen something like that.

I read her blog.  It is something very big, a very big scandal begins because Reuters has published about the lawsuit in English and in Spanish.

La web de citas Match, demandada por unas fotos no autorizadas.
Romance website Match sued for USD1.5 billion over 'unauthorized' photos.


Bigger than the former lawsuit.
When I was interviewed last January 2011 by "Caras y Caretas" (summer in Argentina) I thought there were going to be a big scandal, because former CEO of Match LATAM Countries recognized 75% inactive profiles at Match Argentina, but nothing happened.
Now  ALL Online Dating Industry companies operating Worldwide,
are under the scrutiny of consumers and lawyers now.

Thursday, November 28, 2013

ALL Online Dating Industry companies operating Worldwide,

are under the scrutiny of consumers and lawyers now.

It seems fake profiles in Online Dating sites will be a hot topic for lawyers this busy season in the Online Dating Industry (20th Dec 2013 to 20th Feb 2014)

Perhaps Match can win in Court but they could be incinerated by Journalists or killed by power of word of mouth!

I would recommend to every online dating company, to remove all fake and even inactive profiles if they have any!

Imagine a NEW Legislation for Online Dating Sites to force them disclose how many active members they have (Premium members: paid or with gift subscriptions) ?
And also force them to conduct ID verification ? A variety of new laws, or new interpretations of existing laws, could subject dating sites to claims or otherwise harm their business. (extracted from IAC SEC filing)

During 2008, a lawsuit against Parship in Belgium about "pratiques commerciales trompeuses" forced Parship to disclose how many paid members it had in Belgium (Parship lied about their customers; 80.000 announced, 5.004 in reality, a 6.25% conversion rate, the same to say over 93% inactive profiles!!! )
During January 2011, former CEO of Match LATAM Countries recognized 75% inactive profiles at Match Argentina.

Moreover if Reuters has published about the lawsuit in English and in Spanish, that means it is very veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy important!.

Since years I had been saying "The biggest scammers are not from Ghana or Nigeria.
Match, eHarmony, Chemistry, PerfectMatch, True, Yahoo!Personals and others, what all they did since 1995 until now, were scamming paying members with marketing and credit card billing trickery. The Online Dating Industry needs a major earthquake or a major cataclysm to extinguish those large dinosaurs."
and
They do not want to innovate!

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

 ---------------------------------
What comes after the Social Networking wave?
The Next Big Investment Opportunity on the Internet will be .... Personalization!
Personality Based Recommender Systems and Strict Personality Based Compatibility Matching Engines for serious Online Dating with the normative 16PF5 personality test.
The market remains enormous!!

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Glossybox .... some international branches shut down

"The company's Brazilian website is already down and the service will not run in Italy and Poland for much longer – the management team is still deciding whether the Spanish and Dutch services will continue"
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.com.br
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.nl
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.pl
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.it
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.es
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/glossybox.de
"Around €55m has been invested in Glossybox to date, some of the money tied to the condition of reaching key performance indicators."

"We've temporarily lost our spice"

Two years and nine months after launching, it "became clear that, due to quick growth, not everything went as planned", the founder said (quotes translated from German). "We've temporarily lost our spice and now we're returning to it." .. "the subscriptions could be cancelled monthly, unhappy customers quickly disappear."

"unhappy customers quickly disappear"
can apply to the Online Dating Industry: Match, eHarmony and others.
Match decaying in traffic at doors of peak season of the Online Dating Industry?
https://siteanalytics.compete.com/match.com/
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/match.com
eHarmony decaying in traffic at doors of peak season of the Online Dating Industry?
https://siteanalytics.compete.com/eharmony.com/
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eharmony.com

I think other sites from same investor as Glossybox having low/little or no traffic at all are in the same road as Glossybox
(according to Alexa, they are like phantoms in Latin America where people do mostly NOT use credit cards in Internet. )


http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/edarling.mx
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/edarling.cl

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hellofood.com.mx
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hellofood.com.br
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hellofood.com.ar
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hellofood.com.co
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hellofood.com.pe

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wimdu.co.uk
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wimdu.com.br
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wimdu.com.ar
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wimdu.cl
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wimdu.com.mx

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/carmudi.com.mx

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dafiti.com.br
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/dafiti.com.mx

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/easytaxi.com
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/easytaxi.com.mx
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/easytaxi.com.ar

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lamudi.com.mx
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lamudi.com.co

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linio.com.pe
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linio.com.co
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linio.com.ve
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linio.com.mx


Tuesday, November 26, 2013

iDate Brazil 2013 conference photos

The "South American Dating Conference" in Brazil was one of the most important events for the LATAM dating industry.

Please read South American Market / 2 tips

the plaintiff has won ..... the attention from the press

Reuters has published about the lawsuit in English and in Spanish.

La web de citas Match, demandada por unas fotos no autorizadas.
Romance website Match sued for USD1.5 billion over 'unauthorized' photos.




New lawsuit against Match (nasdaq: IACI)

 UPDATE: Yuliana Avalos has argued in a lawsuit against Match that photos of her were posted without her permission on the site as part of a scam that drove a man to commit suicide.
 -----------------------

"Yuliana Avalos, is a part-time model who never joined Match, but says her pictures have been used in ~200 fake profiles."

It seems fake profiles in Online Dating sites will be a hot topic for lawyers this busy season in the Online Dating Industry (20th Dec 2013 to 20th Feb 2014)

Global Personals Ltd. owns White Label which had been proven by Journalists to invent fake profiles. Same for Cupid PLC who now has new CEO. After that scandal some "UK Dating Sites Found Body To Clean Up Industry"  But they should begin to delete all FAKE and INACTIVE PROFILES  from online dating sites.
The same for Ashley Madison's "Ashley’s Angels"

Match can win in Court but they could be incinerated by Journalists or killed by power of word of mouth!

Imagine a NEW Legislation for Online Dating Sites to force them disclose how many active members they have (Premium members: paid or with gift subscriptions) ?
And also force them to conduct ID verification ? A variety of new laws, or new interpretations of existing laws, could subject dating sites to claims or otherwise harm their business. (extracted from IAC SEC filing)

Please read also
How fake Facebook 'likes' are hitting genuine businesses
Zoosk: fake profiles or using pseudos ???

fake profiles for online dating sites  
Fake profiles at Wamba / part 1    
Fake profiles at Wamba / part 2  
Badoo mysteries (part 1)
Badoo mysteries (part 2)
Badoo mysteries (part 3
Badoo Brazil / Badoo Brasil 

How to detect fake profiles in Argentina & Uruguay
3 big South American failed proposals.
The White Label Dating enigma / part 3
The White Label Dating enigma / part 2
The White Label Dating enigma / part 1

Monday, November 25, 2013

We don't always get to control what other people say about us!

 The Regulation of Reputational Information in The Next Digital Decade: Essays on the Future of the Internet 193 (Berin Szoka & Adam Marcus eds.) (2010) by Dr. Eric Goldman Santa Clara University - School of Law

Dr. Goldman will soon publish:
The Unexpected Benefit of Internet Immunity 
A New Way to Fight Bogus Consumer Reviews 


Remember: 
They can win in Court but they could be incinerated by Journalists or killed by power of word of mouth!

Sunday, November 24, 2013

Online Dating Trends 2014

All is peace and harmony in South America, the Spring had blossom. Birds are singing, the flowers open their petals exhaling sweet fragrance.  The Big Five normative personality test is ......... OBSOLETE!

The Simpsons, Apple, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Google, Hotmail, Yahoo, YouTube, Blogger, Wikipedia, Bing, Twitter, Skype are BIG successes, here,  in Argentina!!!
I have the theory that if something is successful in Argentina, it could be a success in the World.
If it can NOT be a success here in Argentina, it will definitely NOT be a success in the World.

NO online dating company (for serious daters) has success here in Argentina nor Brazil or other Latin American country. 

Hot Summer 2014 will begin this December, with January the hottest month. The wind blowing from the North is very, very hot. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, see why your brain distorts.. Online Dating Trends 2014, same as 2012.

Without offering the NORMATIVE16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry
All other proposals are NOISE and perform as placebo.

With less than USD10 Million you can copycat eHarmony
or
 innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry, killing those old & obsolete sites forever.











Friday, November 22, 2013

eHarmony entering the HR recruiting space YES or NO?

MBAinteract was a failed start up to match employers with people holding a MBA and looking for a new job (5 years ago).

eHarmony moving from dating to job matches ?

I agree that  for matching job seekers with employers, the best predictor of job performance is always: personality!!! 

The Wall Street Journal had published an interesting article about Xerox
"When looking for workers to staff its call centers, Xerox Corp. used to pay lots of attention to applicants who had done the job before. Then, a computer program told the printer and outsourcing company that experience doesn't matter.

The software said that what does matter in a good call-center worker—one who won't quit before the company recoups its USD5,000 investment in training—is personality. "


But the Big Five normative personality test is ......... OBSOLETE!

Online Dating sites have very big databases, in the range of 20,000,000 (twenty million) profiles,  the BIG Five model or the HEXACO model are not enough for predictive purposes. That is why I suggest the 16PF5 test.

No mention to ODS conference, no photos, no Facebook updates, no Twitter hashtags,





not sure what happened. Who can investigate further that issue?
https://twitter.com/OnlineDatingSum
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Online-Dating-Summit/240065856013183
https://twitter.com/rosswilliams
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Williams_%28businessman%29
http://www.onlinedatingsummit.com/en/whois-coming
https://twitter.com/globalpersonals

"He was crowned a winner in the E-commerce category of the Great British Entrepreneur Awards"
http://greatbritishentrepreneurawards.com/award-winners/



Is that a joke?

Global Personals Ltd. owns White Label which had been proven by Journalists to invent fake profiles.
http://www.whitelabeldating.com/about-us/
http://www.channel4.com/news/fools-for-love-how-one-internet-dating-firm-dupes-clients
http://www.onlinepersonalswatch.com/news/2012/11/uk-global-personals-allegedly-uses-fake-profiles.html


Last year they had reported a "record-breaking end to financial year"
http://www.whitelabeldating.com/press/whitelabeldating-com-reports-a-record-breaking-end-to-financial-year/

How WhiteLabelDating had reached those big numbers of its revenue?
Because if you check some of their partners they really do not have traffic at all!


They claim to "provide the technology behind over 12,000 dating sites spanning everything from traditional dating to casual, niche and international sites, including our own sites as well as those of our partners."
http://www.whitelabeldating.com/about-us/


 12,000 dating sites with less than 100 paid members on AVERAGE each one?

http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2013/05/dating-ad-mega-redirects-lead-to-trust-fail/

If you are an expert in the Online Dating Industry, you know they can not have over 12,000 online dating sites and be so successful!
" With annualized revenues approaching £50 million, the company now operates in seven English speaking territories across the globe, including the USA and Australia. It has since gone on to employ 427 people "
http://onlinedatingpost.com/archives/2013/11/global-personals-co-founder-ross-williams-wins-entrepreneur-award/


They can not be so successful as they pretend to be!

Are they running a big adult site I do not know?
Could some of those partners are using white label dating sites to launder money? Who knows?

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

My thoughts about "Cupid Media Hack Exposed 42M Passwords"


Alexa is like a seismograph station for Internet sites.
If you check eHarmony, Match and PlentyOfFish you will see they are high activity level sites.

CupidMedia owns and operates 35+ International online dating sites, no one of them have high activity levels according to Alexa and they are all mostly run in English language, they have low or little traffic rank.

If you register and begin to use any of those sites, perhaps you will discover the main objective is to attract men and send them to other adult content sites ( check the link, in Alexa, www dot blackcupid dot com www.alexa.com/siteinfo/blackcupid.com and see where it redirects! )

To be more clear, those 35+ online dating sites are only "special purposes vehicles" to redirect men to adult content sites, and most probably 90% of profiles in their databases, are only fake profiles of women designed exclusively to redirect men to adult content sites. No more than that. Quite similar to "AshleyMadison case, sued by ex-worker who claims she wrote too many fake female profiles."

using the Big Five model of personality could be considered a FRAUD ?

More about the HEXACO model to replace the Big Five normative personality test soon!
"While the Big-Five has been the dominant approach in personality research for over two decades, recent investigations have identified a sixth independent personality dimension referred to as Honesty-Humility (Ashton & Lee, 2007, 2009). The six independent factors then are: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). This six dimension model, referred to as the HEXACO model, is argued to account for cross-cultural lexical findings, as well the subtle distinctions between personality traits better than the Big-Five (Ashton & Lee, 2007). The original measurement scale of this model consists of the 60-item HEXACO-60 scale (Ashton & Lee, 2009)." extracted from "The Mini-IPIP6: Tiny yet highly stable markers of Big Six personality"

Academics began to publish Scientific Research using the HEXACO model of personality and they plan to discontinue the Big 5 model (a.k.a. Big Five or FFI five factor inventory) soon.

Here a sample list of new and fresh research:

Babarović, T., & Šverko, I. (2013). The HEXACO Personality Domains in the Croatian Sample. Društvena istraživanja, 22(3), 397-411.

Gergov, T., & Stoyanova, S. (2013). Sentimentality and Nostalgia in Elderly People: Psychometric Properties of a New Questionnaire. Psychological Thought, 6(2), 358-375.

Stoeber, J. (2013). How other-oriented perfectionism differs from self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 1-10.

de Vries, R. E., Zettler, I., & Hilbig, B. E. (2013). Rethinking Trait Conceptions of Social Desirability Scales: Impression Management as an Expression of Honesty-Humility. Assessment, 1073191113504619.

de Vries, R. E. (2013). The 24-item Brief HEXACO Inventory (BHI). Journal of Research in Personality, 47(6), 871-880.

Truskauskaitė-Kunevičienė, I., Kaniušonytė, G., Kratavičienė, R., & Kratavičiūtė-Ališauskienė, A. PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES OF THE LITHUANIAN VERSIONS OF HEXACO-100 AND HEXACO-60.

Hepp, J., Hilbig, B. E., Moshagen, M., Zettler, I., Schmahl, C., & Niedtfeld, I. (2014). Active versus reactive cooperativeness in Borderline Psychopathology: A dissection based on the HEXACO model of personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 56, 19-23.

Pham, M. N., & Shackelford, T. K. (2013). Personality Features and Mate Retention Strategies: Honesty-Humility and the Willingness to Manipulate, Deceive, and Exploit Romantic Partners Christopher J. Holden Virgil Zeigler-Hill. Personality and Individual Differences.

Ogunfowora, B., & Bourdage, J. S. (2014). Does Honesty–Humility influence evaluations of leadership emergence? The mediating role of moral disengagement. Personality and Individual Differences, 56, 95-99.

MacCann, C. (2013). Instructed faking of the HEXACO reduces facet reliability and involves more Gc than Gf. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(7), 828-833.

Kam, C., Schermer, J. A., Harris, J., & Vernon, P. A. (2013). Heritability of acquiescence bias and item keying response style associated with the HEXACO personality scale. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 16(4), 790.

Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2013). Prediction of Self-and Observer Report Scores on HEXACO-60 and NEO-FFI Scales. Journal of Research in Personality.

Aghababaei, N. (2013). God, the good life, and HEXACO: the relations among religion, subjective well-being and personality. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, (ahead-of-print), 1-7.

Shaw, A. Z. (2013). The effect of prenatal androgen exposure on the development of neural reactivity systems: A study of the HEXACO Personality Inventory. Personality and Individual Differences.

Rolison, J. J., Hanoch, Y., & Gummerum, M. (2013). Characteristics of offenders: the HEXACO model of personality as a framework for studying offenders’ personality. Journal of Forensic Psychiatry & Psychology, 24(1), 71-82.


Online dating sites using the Big Five model could be considered obsolete sites, because the Big Five model has been proven as "an incomplete model"
As some of the subdomains of the main domains of the HEXACO model are different from the subdomains of the main domains of the Big Five model, it can not be simple added the scale of the Honesty-Humility factor to the Big Five model to upgrade the personality test to the HEXACO model.

".. the Big Five's Agreeableness and HEXACO's Agreeableness are not identical. The Big Five factors do not include an Honesty-Humility factor, but some of the characteristics belonging to Honesty-Humility are incorporated into the Big Five's Agreeableness factor. Although earlier investigations found only the Big Five factors, more recent studies conducted in various languages (including English) with larger sets of adjectives recovered six factors. "

I think, legally, online dating sites using the Big Five model of personality could be considered a FRAUD because they are using an incomplete model of personality. They are assessing 5 scales and not 6 scales.

Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Fined For Posting a Negative Review Online but ...

"This is fraud," Jen said. "They're blackmailing us for telling the truth."
KlearGear goes into hiding as world realizes it's awful

Online Dating Companies should learn of that case.


They can win in Court but they could be incinerated by Journalists or killed by power of word of mouth!

Monday, November 18, 2013

2 tips about Ashley Madison's "Ashley’s Angels"

Ashley Madison discloses in its terms of agreement that some of its profiles may be "fictitious."

5.A
 You acknowledge and agree that some of the profiles posted on the Site are associated with our Ashley’s Angels and may be fictitious.  The purpose of our Ashley’s Angels is to provide entertainment, to allow you to explore our Services and to promote greater participation in our Services.  Ashley’s Angels attempt to simulate communications with real members to encourage more conversation and interaction with users.  We also use Ashley’s Angels to monitor user communications and use of our Service to measure compliance with the Terms.  Further, we may use Ashley’s Angels in connection with our market research to enable us to analyze user preferences, trends, patterns and information about our customer base.  Ashley’s Angels are not intended to resemble or mimic any actual persons.  You understand and acknowledge that we create the Ashley’s Angels profiles and those profiles are not based on any user or member of our Service.  A single Ashley’s Angels may have more than one profile on our Service.  You acknowledge and agree that the descriptions, pictures and information included in the profiles of our Ashley’s Angels are not associated with a real person, but are provided primarily for your amusement.

Ashley’s Angels message with Guest users, but not with Members.  Ashley’s Angels contact users through computer generated messages, including emails and instant messages.  Ashley’s Angels may offer, initiate or send winks,  private keys, and virtual gifts.  Ashley’s Angels message with multiple users at the same or substantially the same times.  Not only is this feature for your entertainment, but Ashley’s Angels allows us to collect messages, instant chat and/or replies from individuals or programs for market research and/or customer experience and/or quality control and/or compliance purposes. Ashley’s Angels are NOT conspicuously identified as such.

 


1) Ashley’s Angels message with Guest users, but not with Members.
2) Ashley’s Angels are NOT conspicuously identified as such.
the main purpose of that activity seems to be encouraging free users (guests) to become members. To encourage them to subscribe and NOT to provide entertainment, amusement to free users.

They can win in Court but they could be incinerated by Journalists or killed by power of word of mouth!

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Birth order does not have enduring effects on personality!

 
PAPER: Birth order and personality: A within-family test using independent self-reports from both firstborn and laterborn siblings

Abstract
Assumptions about the effects of birth order on personality abound in popular culture and self-help books. Indeed, when one sibling is asked to compare themselves to others in their family, birth order shows weak-to-moderate effects on personality. No study to date, however, has utilized a complete within-family design that includes independent self-reports from both firstborn and laterborn siblings in the same family. To fill this gap, we collected Big Five personality data on 69 young adult firstborn–laterborn sibling pairs. We also obtained data from parents of the sibling pairs and peer ratings of original participants’ personality traits. Within-family analyses revealed that neither siblings’ independent self-reported personality traits, nor parents’ reports of their children’s personality traits, differed systematically as a function of birth order. Our findings are consistent with results from between-family designs and they provide further evidence, employing a within-family design that utilizes data from multiple family members, that birth order does not have enduring effects on personality.









MatchWise, Chemistry, PlentyOfFish Chemistry Predictor, eVow, TeAmoRu  and other sites use/used the Birth Order Item, but it is useless at all for Serious Online Dating!


Please remember: Personality traits are highly stable in persons over 25 years old to 45 years old.


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

 ---------------------------------
What comes after the Social Networking wave?
The Next Big Investment Opportunity on the Internet will be .... Personalization!
Personality Based Recommender Systems and Strict Personality Based Compatibility Matching Engines for serious Online Dating with the normative 16PF5 personality test.

Friday, November 15, 2013

UPDATE AshleyMadison - fake profiles

Recently AshleyMadison sued by ex-worker who claims she wrote too many fake female profiles.

Business Insider spoke to Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara Law to get some insight into Ashley Madison's bogus profiles. It turns out they may be in a legal gray area.
Ashley Madison — and other sites with fake profiles — may face enforcement actions from the Federal Trade Commission, which has been more aggressive lately about fake content online, according to Goldman.

Imagine a NEW Legislation for Online Dating Sites to force them disclose how many active members they have (Premium members: paid or with gift subscriptions) ?

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Operating at a Loss since years.




They are a minor player in the Online Dating Industry and I seriously doubt they can innovate.
Spark Networks Reports Third Quarter Financial Results


Not sure how they can have those terrible high "Cost of revenue", perhaps they are Marketing Expenses instead because as Dave said in other case "Spend a lot of ad dollars so revenue looks good, thats easy. Running at a loss for years and years is a clear indicator of dating sites that don't really care about anything but making money."

They are the ones who released an EXCELLENT research! Mobile's Impact on Dating and Relationships.

OnlinePersonalsWatch have been tracking them since some time ago.

SeekingAlpha had transcripted the last conference call.
"Christian Networks' growth over the past 3 years has been driven largely by the 700% increase in average paying subscribers we have seen over that time. But, as you can see, Jewish Networks ARPU is about 60% higher than that of our Christian Networks segment. While growing our Christian Networks subscriber base remains a key focus of ours, we have told you that over time, we would begin to shift more of our attention to price optimization or yield management."

Dating Sites using the Big Five normative test are OBSOLETE

All new and fresh research are using the HEXACO (aka Big Six test) but as Online Dating sites have very big databases, in the range of 20,000,000 (twenty million) profiles,  the BIG Five model or the HEXACO model are not enough for predictive purposes. That is why I suggest the 16PF5 test.







ALL Online  Dating Sites using the Big Five normative test are OBSOLETE now!
The BIG5 normative personality test is the biggest mistake Psychologists made since several years ago. The BIG5 is also known as the Five Factor Model theory of personality traits, a psychological model based on research by Paul Costa and Robert McCrae
BIG5 normative personality test is OBSOLETE 

"While the Big-Five has been the dominant approach in personality research for over two decades, recent investigations have identified a sixth independent personality dimension referred to as Honesty-Humility (Ashton & Lee, 2007, 2009). The six independent factors then are: Honesty-Humility (H), Emotionality (E), Extraversion (X), Agreeableness (A), Conscientiousness (C), and Openness to Experience (O). This six dimension model, referred to as the HEXACO model, is argued to account for cross-cultural lexical findings, as well the subtle distinctions between personality traits better than the Big-Five (Ashton & Lee, 2007). The original measurement scale of this model consists of the 60-item HEXACO-60 scale (Ashton & Lee, 2009)."


Wednesday, November 13, 2013

IBM Deciphers Personality Types From 200 Tweets ?


Just read that post at Online Dating Insider and guess ...
Nothing new.

Profiling by music preferences, video preferences, color preferences, bookmarks preferences, handwriting analysis, purchases and buying trends from credit cards, facial features and other methods like them to assess personality add distortion to the measurement.

Moreover the HEXACO normative test is replacing the obsolete Big Five Model of personality.
“While the Big Five has been the dominant approach in personality research for over two decades, recent investigations have identified a sixth independent personality dimension referred to as Honesty-Humility (Ashton & Lee, 2007, 2009). ”

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. They need to calculate personality similarity between users but there are different formulas to calculate similarity.

In case you did not notice, recommender systems are morphing to .......... compatibility matching engines, as the same used in the Online Dating Industry since years, with low success rates!!! because they mostly use the Big5 to assess personality and the Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate similarity.
Please remember: Personality traits are highly stable in persons over 25 years old to 45 years old.

Online Dating sites have very big databases, in the range of 20,000,000 (twenty million) profiles, so the BIG5 model or the HEXACO model are not enough for predictive purposes. That is why I suggest the 16PF5 test.

The only way to revolutionize the Online Dating Industry 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 and expressing compatibility with eight decimals (needs a quantized pattern comparison method, part of pattern recognition by cross-correlation, to calculate similarity between prospective mates.)
All other proposals are NOISE and perform as placebo.
e.g. eHarmony's algorithm is in the range of showing you 3 most compatible persons per 1,000 persons screened, and with the 16PF5 you can reach 3 most compatible persons per 100,000 persons screened; a 100 times more powerful algorithm (NOT 100% improvement, a 100 X improvement, really an innovation)


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

 ---------------------------------
What comes after the Social Networking wave?
The Next Big Investment Opportunity on the Internet will be .... Personalization!
Personality Based Recommender Systems and Strict Personality Based Compatibility Matching Engines for serious Online Dating with the normative 16PF5 personality test.



Monday, November 11, 2013

AshleyMadison sued by ex-worker

AshleyMadison sued by ex-worker who claims she wrote too many fake female profiles.

A dating website for married people who want to cheat on their spouses is being sued by a former employee who says she damaged her wrists typing up hundreds of fake profiles of sexy women.

........
 she was led to believe "that doing so was some sort of a normal business practice in the industry," it says.

Do you remember "Intriguing information from Avid Life Media (Ashley Madison)"

Saturday, November 9, 2013

FEATURED PAPER: Improving User Profile with Personality Traits


Improving User Profile with Personality Traits Predicted from Social Media Content

ABSTRACT
Existing studies indicate that there exists strong correlation between personality and personal preference, thus personality could potentially be used to build more personalized recommender system. Personality traits are mainly measured by psychological questionnaires, and it is hard to obtain personality traits of large amount of users in real-world scenes.
In this paper, we propose a new approach to automatically identify personality traits with Social Media contents in Chinese language environments. Social Media content features were extracted from 1766 Sina micro blog users, and the predicting model is trained with machine learning algorithms.
The experimental results demonstrate that users' personality traits could be predicted from Social Media contents with acceptable Pearson Correlation, which makes it possible to develop user profiles for recommender system. In future, user profiles with predicted personality traits would be used to enhance the performance of existing personalized recommendation systems.



The above paper is from RecSys '13 Proceedings of the 7th ACM conference on Recommender systems.

Some key points and my thoughts:

The HEXACO normative test will replace the obsolete Big Five Model of personality.

"individuals with similar personality traits prefer to similar types of music " seems to be wrong.
"Value similarity is the missing link in explaining the musical bonding phenomenon [and not personality similarity], which seems to hold for Western and non-Western samples and in experimental and natural settings. " extracted from paper "How Shared Preferences in Music Create Bonds Between People: Values as the Missing Link" 2011

Profiling by music preferences to assess personality
video preferences to assess personality
color preferences to assess personality
bookmarks preferences to assess personality
handwriting analysis to assess personality
purchases and buying trends from credit cards to assess personality
facial features to assess personality
and other methods like them add distortion to the measurement.

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. They need to calculate personality similarity between users but there are different formulas to calculate similarity.

In case you did not notice, recommender systems are morphing to .......... compatibility matching engines, as the same used in the Online Dating Industry since years, with low success rates!!! because they mostly use the Big5 to assess personality and the Pearson correlation coefficient to calculate similarity.
Please remember: Personality traits are highly stable in persons over 25 years old to 45 years old.

Online Dating sites have very big databases, in the range of 20,000,000 (twenty million) profiles, so the BIG5 model or the HEXACO model are not enough for predictive purposes. That is why I suggest the 16PF5 test.


The only way to revolutionize the Online Dating Industry 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 and expressing compatibility with eight decimals (needs a quantized pattern comparison method, part of pattern recognition by cross-correlation, to calculate similarity between prospective mates.) 

High precision in matching algorithms is precisely the key to open the door and leave the infancy of compatibility testing.
It is all about achieving the eighth decimal!
With 8 decimals, you have more precision than any person could achieve by searching on one's own, but the only way to achieve the eighth decimal is using analysis and correlation with quantized patterns.

Without offering the NORMATIVE16PF5 (or similar test measuring exactly the 16 personality factors) for serious dating, it will be impossible to innovate and revolutionize the Online Dating Industry All other proposals are NOISE and perform as placebo.

Which is the RIGHT approach to innovate in the Personality Based Recommender Systems Arena?
The same approach to innovate in the Online Dating Industry == 16PF5 test or similar to assess personality traits and a new method to calculate similarity between quantized patterns.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Stupid Investors? Twitter IPO

A social network / instant messaging blog based solely on a 140 characters lenght messages, for me, is now ending 2013, really obsolete, because you can read Google Plus and Facebook posts on real time using mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

Please read also:
The Terrible Cost Of Patents 
Zoosk imminent IPO ?
More Tech bubble, Twitter IPO next Thanksgiving 2013?

Do you remember Zynga, Pandora, Yelp and others? Even LinkedIn.

There is a large dotcom bubble fueled by venture investment funds, investors who are dragging other investors to continue investing until they can sell shares of the company and recover leveraged money, but the last holder of shares is going to lose.
Many technology companies, without having a concrete business model (supposedly will generate revenue from advertising and premium subscription accounts) receive millions of dollars in funding to offer something free, acquiring fastly a large mass of captive users as if they had made them addicts, and then, the exit strategy (for investors) is to get someone to buy the company at a staggering figure, as did Blogger, Fotolog, MySpace, YouTube, Skype, Bebo and others. They are like continually inflating balloons and they need to find a buyer before they explode. If they can not find a private buyer for the entire company, the investors had the strategy of going public, to start trading its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, they turn those pieces of paper (shares) in real money, they get thousands of buyers purchasing lower small parts (shares).