“We’re the antithesis of sites like Match and eHarmony,” says Stephen Stokols, cofounder of speeddating site WooMe. “It’s instant gratification.”
Videocentered services like SpeedDate, Sayheyhey and WooMe reel in online speed daters by offering quick registration, free memberships and the tantalizing promise of a date within minutes. Others, like Ice Brkr and Crazy Blind Date, rely on text messaging to coordinate speedy meetings.
Researchers say virtual dating could boost matchmaking potential, since video daters know instantaneously if they have that elusive chemistry.
Welcome to Dating 2.0. A bevy of new services is banking on the booming popularity of web video, text messaging and social networking to amp up online matchmaking for the Web 2.0 crowd.
WooMe cofounder George Berkowski says realworld speed dating tends to be expensive and timeconsuming, and the crowds are average. WooMe extends the concept, letting users move beyond simple speed dating to arrange interviews for travel partners and roommates.
“Within a minute, you know if a person is funny or not, if you two click or not, thanks to social clues like body language,” says Michael Norton, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School.
“Dating sites have finally gotten into what people in this generation want and expect,” Rosen says. “When you’re looking at a group that craves anything new, the site that manages to provide that will win, at least until something better comes along.”
The new services have quickly reached significant milestones: WooMe has facilitated upward of 100,000 introductions, SpeedDate has hosted more than 100,000 speed dates and Crazy Blind Date has registered 10,000 users, according to the services’ representatives. Online dating is a growth industry that JupiterResearch predicts will generate more than $900 million a year in the United States by 2011.
WooMe, backed by original Skype backer Mangrove Capital Partners, allows members to create short groupvideochat sessions. SpeedDate, based in San Mateo, California, files a seemingly endless line of daters through your virtual door for threeminute “video dates” supplemented with a text client. With Sayheyhey, users upload a YouTubestyle clip of themselves, and viewers interested in a date ping the posters with intro videos of their own.
Young Stars Revealed by XRayApple Downloads a Decade of iTunesAppCompatible PJs for Bedtime StoriesDoes the Galaxy S4 Live Up to the Hype?Zynga Launches ‘Draw Something 2′ With. He’s shifting awkwardly in his chair as he adjusts his webcam, and a comment about American Idol makes it immediately clear you haven’t found your soul mate. You promptly click “End date” and after a few moments your next date appears, and you’re ready to begin again.
A handful of nextgen dating services updates the original onlinedating sites’ standard mix of exhaustive personality surveys and poring over profiles in search of a potential mate. They’re the latest twists on internet dating, which drew in 22.6 million people this year, according to data collected by comScore.
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