PembePanjur, another HOAX.

In previous posts I had reviewed
eCift (Parship rebranded for the Turkish market)



PembePanjur's Personality test is only the IPSATIVE and OBSOLETE Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

It is quite similar to PerfertMatch

Remember:
ThomasKnowsPleople is an adapted ipsative DISC personality model.
PerfectMatch is an adapted ipsative MBTI personality model.
Chemistry is a proprietary ipsative Explorer, Builder, Negotiator, Director personality model.
Itelligent Elite uses the 16PT ipsative test (not the normative 16PF5)
FaceReader from Profiler1 uses an ipsative test.
DoskonalaPara uses a proprietary ipsative test quite similar to Chemistry's
Energy Profiling also uses a proprietary ipsative test.


eHarmony, eCift/Parship, Be2, MeeticAffinity/DatingDirectAffinity/MatchAffinity, TeAmo use the normative Big5 personality model.
Worldwide, no one dating site uses the 16PF5 normative personality test.

Ipsative tests are based on forced choice questions and responses. Each choice is scored. These scores can only represent the relative strengths of the person being tested and cannot be compared to any other individuals. Such tests can typically be identified in the marketplace by the test asking the person to 'describe themselves'. This type of test would not normally be used in recruitment and selection.
Normative tests measure quantifiable characteristics on individual scales. These scales can vary independently. Also the scores can measure the characteristics of an individual against confirmed patters of normality (e.g. normal distribution or Gaussian distribution). Normative testing allows people to be compared to particular groups, populations, or jobs.
Normative testing generally has a higher validity than ipsative.
"You can have one Myers-Briggs personality on Tuesday and another when you retake the test on Thursday" Barbara Ehrenreich (2006)

Zoosk: sudden drop

Alexa shows Zoosk had suffered a sudden drop. I do not think it is due a big mobile adoption rate.
Perhaps their daters are becoming tired of Zoosk. Or are they running out of money?

They had received a ton of money from venture funds, but Zoosk can not revolutionize the Online Dating Industry. They only made some noise during 2010.

Online Dating site, ZOOSK is not a Scientific Matchmaking Service/System.
That method is only a HOAX!


Zoosk will be a case of study for several venture funds.

PlentyOfFish Success Rate

In that article, Ms. Kate Bilenki, "director of love at PlentyOfFish, the Vancouver-based dating site with more than 33 million registered users worldwide" (the site’s membership has increased 40% over the last two years), had also said "PlentyOfFish is responsible over a million relationships per year, and about 300,000 of those result in marriage"

1 M relationships == 2 M persons.
2 million / 33 million == 0.06 or 6% Success Rate

but if it is over a million but less than 1.5 million

less than 3 million persons / 33 million == 0.09 or 9% Success Rate
i.e. PlentyOfFish is performing as placebo, Success Rate less than 10%.

quite similar to eHarmony
148,311 marriages and 1,130,006 non-married, monogamous relationships (ESTIMATED TO BE) started by eHarmony, between January 1, 2008 and June 30, 2009.

eHarmony reached 40 million members during 2011
eHarmony reached 30 million members during 2009

148,311 marriages and 1,130,006 non-married, monogamous relationships ==
2,556,634 persons
2,556,634 persons / 30 million == 0.085 or 8.5% Success Rate for eHarmony.

The majority, over 90% of eHarmony's members are not going to achieve a long term relationship with commitment (or marriage) using that site.
and quite similar to Match

Moreover the entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with a low effectiveness/efficiency level of their matching algorithms (less than 10%)

Online Dating sites should begin offering Compatibility Distribution Curves, showing how compatible you are with the rest of other members.
like this sample.

stealth online social dating company

This post is exclusively written for the investors who plan to lose money in the new stealth mode online social dating company.  That stealth online social dating company is founded by a former VP Match who is not an entrepreneur; he is only a "marketinero", a smoke seller, but he can not innovate in nothing. It is not going to revolutionize the Online Dating Industry.

It seems that new stealth online social dating company launching Q4 2011 is going to be a copycat of Yangutu.

It will be an online social dating site for fun, for entertainment purposes but it seems it is going to include a proprietary personality test adapted from ... guess .... "oneGoodLove" but in this case for straigth persons.

From its help section:
How does the "oneGoodLove" Personality Test work?
The "oneGoodLove" Personality Test is a way to assess who you are and what you are like; in other words, your personality as it relates to relationships. This is then used to match you with another person that has a compatible personality. "oneGoodLove" has not only identified 27 different personality types but also identified which personality types are compatible with each other. Our Personality Test has been scientifically designed by doctors and PhD’s in psychology and other related fields. It uses a proven algorithm that has successfully matched thousands of happy couples.

I would love to know who are those "doctors and PhD’s in psychology and other related fields", if they really exist!

MySpace seems to be the biggest dating application for fun dating in Facebook.
Badoo
Mamboo
Yangutu
OkCupid
even PlentyOfFish are online social dating sites for fun, for entertainment purposes.

Social networking/applications could merge with online dating for fun, for flirting, for entertainment purposes, for instant gratification.
Social networking and online dating for serious daters are like water and oil, they will never mix.

The U.S. (and Worldwide) MARKET OPPORTUNITY REMAINS ENORMOUS but only for innovations, not for the same stuff already available from Badoo, Yangutu, Mamboo, OkCupid and PlentyOfFish.

WorldWide, there are over 5,000 online dating sites
but no one is using the 16PF5 (or similar test) to assess personality of its members.
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

Online Dating sites should begin offering Compatibility Distribution Curves, showing how compatible you are with the rest of other members.

new online dating startup

It seems (because it is not confirmed yet) that Insight Venture Partners plans to invest up to USD 10 million in a new online dating startup in stealth mode founded by the former VP Match who had rejected my project in 2004.

Stay tuned. I will be posting some insightful comments and screenshots soon of that new HOAX?

Personality, Partner Similarity and Couple Satisfaction

Recent development in the field of personality psychology has indicated that personality traits may be a powerful influence over our satisfaction within relationships and perhaps even predictive of whom we are attracted to as a couple.

The United States boasts one of the highest divorce rates in the world, according to Popenoe & Whitehead (2010), who report that 40% of first marriages, 60% of second marriages and 73% of third marriages result in divorce. Furthering the cause for concern is the research predicting that only 25% of couples will remain happily married after only ten years of marriage (Popenoe & Whitehead, 2010).

PAPER
Personality, Partner Similarity and Couple Satisfaction: Do Opposites Attract or Birds of a Feather Flock Together?

The goal of that study was to examine the relationship between personality and marital satisfaction and partner pairing. A U.S. national sample of 10,000 married couples (2,000 couples from each of the five couple typologies: Vitalized, Harmonious, Conventional, Conflicted, and Devitalized) took the PREPARE/ENRICH couple assessment and the results were examined to determine whether couples with similar personalities were more satisfied in their marriage than couples with dissimilar personalities and whether individuals were more likely to pair with someone with a similar personality or different personality. Couples were grouped into four possible categories: both high, both low, both moderate, and one high - one low, based on their scores within each of the five personality scales. A frequency analysis was then performed to determine how many couples fell into each category. A Pearson chi - squared test determined whether the distribution was significantly different than what could be expected by chance.
The sample consisted ages from 18 to over 70 years old, with the majority (18%) of the population falling into the category of 26 - 30 years old. The median length of marriage was 1 - 5 years (27%), with a range of less than one year to over 40 years of marriage. The majority (44%) of participants reported living in a suburban area. Over half of the participants reported having a higher education. The vast majority (78%) of the sample identified themselves as Caucasian. 77% reported their current marriage as their first marriage.

Results indicate that there is no relationship between personality similarities/differences and marital satisfaction [using the Big5 to assess personality and a crosstabulation to calculate similarity, THE AUTHOR SHOULD HAD USED THE 16PF5 ], and that individuals are 66% more likely to pair with someone with a different personality than their own. [Well, that explains why the divorce rate is so high!]
However, personality similarities/differences do play a role in judgment of marital satisfaction, as those couples who both score high in each of the five dimensions of personality were significantly more satisfied in their relationship than those who both scored low.

According to PREPARE/ENRICH, Vitalized couples tend to be the happiest .... couples with a typology of Vitalized (high satisfaction) will most often have both partners scoring high in all five SCOPE (Big5) scales ... although it is generally accepted that a variety of personality combinations may result in successful relationships, it appears that the “best” combination for a happy couple is for both couples to score high on the five factors.

weak points of research:
* Big 5 to assess personality: Since the traits which compose the Big Five model are relatively broad, they are not nearly as predictive and accurate for explaining human behavior as some of the more abundant, specific traits. Participants’ personality was measured using SCOPE personality scales, which is a component of the PREPARE/ENRICH (Olson & Larson, 2008) couple assessment.
* How similarity was calculated
and
* Remember The median length of marriage in the sample was 1 - 5 years (27%), with a range of less than one year to over 40 years of marriage.  Klohnen & Luo in 2005: " whereas similarity in attitudes and values appears to be important early on in the relationship and may play an important role in relationship progression, personality similarity becomes more important as the relationship reaches greater commitment."

Dijkstra and Barelds from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands had written "The present study's results, as well as the results found in previous studies (e.g., Eastwick & Finkel, 2008), may be used to EDUCATE people, especially singles, about what really matters in long-term relationships, for instance, similarity in personality*, instead of complementarity."
("Perceptions of Ideal and Former Partners' Personality and Similarity")
*personality measured with a normative test.

Basisnote, GenePartner, ScientificMatch

Last year I had written about Basisnote
and
DNA matching methods in general

Basisnote, GenePartner, ScientificMatch and other proposals offering DNA matching are only based on the T_shirt Experiment that only proved:
normally cycling women (not pregnant and not taking contraceptive pills) are (temporarily) attracted by the perspiration scent of clothes used by men with a Major Histocompatibility Complex MHC more dissimilar to theirs,
and not proved: women attracted by those men for long term mating with commitment.
and
2 Scientific Papers debunk their claims.
1) "Human oestrus" Gangestad & Thornhill (2008)
"Only short-term but not long-term partner preferences tend to vary with the menstrual cycle"

2) "Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans?" Alvergne & Lummaa (2009)
".. whereas normally cycling women express a preference for MHC (Major Histocompatibility Complex) dissimilarity in mates, pill users prefer odours of MHC-SIMILAR men, indicating that pill use might eliminate adaptive preferences for genetic dissimilarity."
................
"Recently, Roberts et al. attempted to eliminate these potential confounds by adopting a within-subject design in which women's mate preferences were assessed before and after they began taking the pill. Women starting the pill showed a significant preference shift towards MHC SIMILARITY compared with three months before the pill was taken, a shift that was not observed in the control group of normally cycling women."


I thought Basisnote, GenePartner, ScientificMatch were going to surrender with their claims, but they insist with that HOAX.

Energy Profiling HOAX

"Personology is the 'science' of exposing an individual's personality based on one's facial structure."

I would love to see a paper showing the correlations of facial features with the traits of their own personality model!!!

Personology is like handwriting analysis, music - films/movies/video - bookmarks - colors preferences or graphic quizzes to assess personality traits, ALL indirect methods, ADD a lot of DISTORTION to the measurement.
The best way to assess personality of daters is using a normative instrument.

In previous posts I had written about
Soul2Match
Find You FaceMate
and
"FaceReader from Profiler1: Personality Traits analysis based on facial features."

Here is another HOAX: Energy Profiling

Energy Profiling claims are:
"Energy Profiling is a unique profiling system that not only assesses personality traits, but also your behavior, thought and feeling processes, body language and physical characteristics to reveal the true you.
.........................
Energy Profiling is a simple system that categorizes people into one of four groups. This simple reference system speaks volumes once you understand your Type. Carol’s system has four types: Type 1, Type 2, Type 3, and Type 4."

I would love to see any peer_reviewed Scientifc Paper by Academics from different Universities showing the above can be true!

I remember I had contactred the author of Energy Profiling 2 years ago because she claimed
"If I were single I would use Energy Profiling to give me the added insight I would want when I met someone to know if they were my 'type.'
If you are single have some fun using Energy Profiling as an added tool to help you meet the person that is the right “type” for you! "


Read what I had written about "victims of human experimentation ?"

Remember:
ThomasKnowsPleople is an adapted ipsative DISC personality model.
PerfectMatch is an adapted ipsative MBTI personality model.
Chemistry is a proprietary ipsative Explorer, Builder, Negotiator, Director personality model.
eHarmony, eCift/Parship, Be2, MeeticAffinity/DatingDirectAffinity/MatchAffinity use the normative Big5 personality model.
Worldwide, no one dating site uses the 16PF5 normative personality test.

Breaking "the online dating sound barrier" is to achieve far better precision than searching on one's own or mutual filtering.

Actual Online Dating sites are fully intoxicated with different versions of the FFI five factor inventory / Big5 or other proprietary models instead (like Chemistry or PerfectMatch), to measure personality traits, and all of those tests are more simplified versions than the 16PF5 normative personality test.

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 6.7 * 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

Soul2Match and Find Your FaceMate are SCAMS, HOAXES

Both Soul2Match and Find Your FaceMate are SCAMS, HOAXES.

Use the same pair of photos and you will receive different results in both matching proposals as I proved in this blog.

Although Soul2Match's and Find Your FaceMate's personality similarity approach are correct, how they assess personality (indirect method to measure the Big5 traits, ADDS DISTORTION to the measurement) and how Soul2Match and Find Your FaceMate calculate similarity (low precision method, I guess similarity is calculated using Pearson's product moment coefficient) is incorrect.
Compatibility is expressed only as a percentage, from 0% to 100%.
 Soul2Match and Find Your FaceMate suffer from the range convergence phenomenon I had discovered during 2003. That range convergence phenomenon is what I had called "the online dating sound barrier"
Who independently validated and independently certified how that profiling technology correlates with the Big5 traits?
I want to see a paper showing Soul2Match/Find Your FaceMate correlates with the Big5 traits (like the one for the Dewey Color System showing its correlation with the 16PF and the distortion it adds.)

ALL indirect methods, ADD a lot of DISTORTION to the measurement.
The best way to assess personality of daters is using a normative instrument.

victims of human experimentation ?

The writer and journalist Lori Gottlieb (March 2006) noted about the growing number of Internet dating sites that are using the science of attraction to match singles: "their efforts mark the early days of a social experiment of unprecedented proportions, involving millions of couples and possibly extending over the course of generations"

In a previous post I had also written about "The horse named Jim in the Online Dating Industry."
The entire Online Dating Industry for serious daters in 1st World Countries is a HOAX, performing as a Big Online Casino, with low successful rates.
The Online Dating Industry is performing like the Pharmaceutical and Cosmetic Industry before the USA Food and Drug Administration was created. The Online Dating Industry is selling elixirs, tonics, snake oil liniments and other patent medicine.

The Online Dating Industry is waiting for the innovative compatibility matching method which can kill the Matchmaking Industry and other Offline Dating Proposals.

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, 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.

To solve that problem I propose:
*) the 16PF5 or similar normative personality test to measure personality of normal persons over 26 years old interested in serious dating.
No actual online dating site offering compatibility matching methods uses the 16PF5 normative test available in different languages.
*) a new quantitative method to calculate compatibility between prospective mates, based on quantized pattern comparison (part of pattern recognition by correlation) named LIFEPROJECT method.
The value of my algorithm is to achieve far more precision than searching on one's own [in the range of 3 persons compatible per 100,000 persons screened, 100 times better than actual competitors]
and
try to prove if only high level on  personality*  similarity* between mates is the core of relationship stability and satisfaction for normal persons over 26 years old interested in serious dating.
*personality: measured with the 16PF5 normative test in different languages.
*similarity: calculated using the method I had invented, LIFEPROJECT method.

Be2 death

More than 1 year ago, I had written about "Be2 game over"  I was right.
Be2 claims now 25.759.333 Registrered Members, but nobody uses it.
You can check Be2's several domains using Alexa and you will discover low traffic and high bounces rates.
Here the sample for France, the reader can check the other domains, some of them with no traffic at all.

The same is also valid for their casual site, C-Date.

Be2 SHOULD BE A CASE OF STUDY of how internationalization had failed.
eHarmony, Match and Meetic also in the same road.

The team never understood how to innovate in the online dating arena.
How much money did Be2 lose? Over 15 million Euros?

best paper RecSys 2011 Conference

I had been checking the list of accepted papers from RecSys 2011 Conference.
It seems some researchers in the recommendation systems arena had fallen asleep.

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.

RecSys 2010 Conference was full of papers about Personality based recommender systems, but this RecSys 2011 Conference has only one outstanding paper:
Rong Hu and Pearl Pu, 2011 "Enhancing Collaborative Filtering Systems with Personality Information"

"Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most successful recommendation approaches, continues to attract interest in both academia and industry. However, one key issue limiting the success of collaborative filtering in certain application domains is the cold-start problem, a situation where historical data is too sparse (known as the sparsity problem), new users have not rated enough items (known as the new user problem), or both. In this paper, we aim at addressing the cold-start problem by incorporating human personality into the collaborative filtering framework. We propose three approaches: the first is a recommendation method based on users’ personality information alone; the second is based on a linear combination of both personality and rating information; and the third uses a cascade mechanism to leverage both resources.
To evaluate their effectiveness, we have conducted an experimental study comparing the proposed approaches with the traditional ratingbased CF in two cold-start scenarios: sparse data sets and new users. Our results show that the proposed CF variations, which consider personality characteristics, can significantly improve the performance of the traditional rating-based CF in terms of the evaluation metrics Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) sensitivity."
A ROC sensitivity value of 1.0 indicates that the recommendation algorithm is able to predict all relevant items correctly, whereas a value of 0.0 indicates that it predicts any of the relevant items as bad.

Although there are some weak points like:
* Value similarity is the missing link in explaining the musical bonding phenomenon [and not personality similarity]
* personality measured by personality quizzes has HIGH DISTORTION. Big Five Factor personality model is an oversimplification.
* The personality similarity between two user "u" and "v" is computed using the Pearson correlation coefficient.
See how LIFEPROJECT METHOD calculates similarity.
Similarity in personality patterns with (a proprietary) pattern recognition by correlation method. It takes into account the score and the trend to score of any pattern.