Lee Semel

I’m staying in a hotel in Vancouver that’s nice, except for the fact they charge $12.99 a day for Internet access.  Come on guys, this is 2006.  Maybe they should charge for hot water, electricity, and ice, too.  Apparently they’re not making enough on the room as it is, and need to gouge their customers with fees and extras. 

Given the many failings of online dating sites, finding dates online ultimately degenerates into an exercise in marketing. This is a really sorry state of affairs, and can’t be a good way to meet people. Here are some tips that I’ve found to be helpful, to make the experience less frustrating:

• Know your goal. Your goal is to get off the site ASAP and to begin communicating offline, either on the phone or in-person. Chat and email cannot substitute for real human contact.
• Don’t lie. Put your best foot forward, but never stretch the truth. Any lies about your age, weight, height, likes and dislikes, or other traits will come out once you meet. If they want to meet someone tall, and you’re short, lying in order to meet them isn’t going to magically change their mind. Now you’re not only short, you’re short and dishonest.
• Respect other members and treat them well. Browsing a dating site often feels like browsing products on Amazon.com. But these are real people, not products. Treat people like other human beings, be polite, and show respect for them.
• Post only one photo. Many people post outdated or manipulated photos. This creates an atmosphere of suspicion. Whenever there are multiple photos, people will start to compare them, and focus on any differences as evidence of dissimulation. “So which of these does she really looks like?” Pick one really good photo that resembles how you actually look, and use that.
• Log in regularly. Many dating sites sort users by “most active” or “recently logged in”, and whoever happens to be online appears toward the top of the search results.
• Send more emails. Dating sites also sort by “most popular”, which comes down to the number of number of emails received. The more emails you receive, the higher up in the search results you’ll be. To receive more emails, send out more emails. Be open to different types of people. Don’t search endlessly for the perfect match.
• Be discriminating. You can often tell from what people write whether they’d be a good match for you. If you hate sports, don’t write to people who love sports. While you need to send a lot of emails, exercise some discrimination in whom you send them to, so you don’t waste each other’s time.
• Write short intro emails. Some people spend a lot of time crafting each email they send. This is a waste of time. Dating sites list both paying and non-paying members. Non-paying members can’t read your email, but will get a notice when you email them exhorting them to sign up so they can read your email. This is a scam the sites use to appear like they have more members. When you write a long intro email, you never know if the other person is really a paying member or not, and there’s a good chance they won’t be able to read your painstakingly crafted note. The best intro note is a one line email complimenting the person on something you found positive about their profile. (This also shows you read what they wrote, and that you may be genuinely interested in them, not just randomly spamming.)
• Expand your geographic area. If you’re in New York or another big city, everyone has many more people to choose from. If you expand the geographic area to include less populated areas like the boroughs or New Jersey, you’ll appear in the results for users who have fewer choices, and they’ll be more likely to respond to you. This can increase your popularity rank, because you’ll receive more emails. And you may meet some nice people.
• Send it and forget it. If someone doesn’t write back, it doesn’t reflect negatively on you. Don’t get attached to any particular profile. You don’t know who’s a paid user who can read your mail, and who’s not. You don’t know what people are really looking for. If they write back, great, but if they don’t, it doesn’t reflect on you in any way.
• Avoid sites that use personality tests. Many sites purport to match you using psychological tests such as the MBTI, or “fun” tests generated by the members. The problem with psychological tests is that the sites go to great lengths to block you from talking to anyone who doesn’t exactly match your test results. E-Harmony is the worst in this respect. E-Harmony makes you fill out pages and pages of personality tests before it deigns to dole out a match. At this point, you’re forced to go through four more levels of computer-mediated multiple-choice questions before you even get to email to the person. It takes weeks of back and forth, and with each phase, the odds of actually talking to the other person diminish.Other sites, such as OkCupid, are filled with “fun” tests made up by the members. The problem here is that you can easily get caught up in taking the tests, wasting a lot of time when your goal should be to meet people and get off the site.

Researchers at Harvard Business School have figured out what most users of online dating know — it doesn’t work. Online dating turns what should be social experience between two people into an artificial experience that feels like online shopping. It is insane how many roadblocks the sites put in place before you can really interact as human beings. Finding someone online feels more like searching for a book on Amazon.com test than any known form of social interaction. Fill in some forms, do a search, get a list of “products” to browse, send a bunch of emails and spend hours in chat. After days or weeks of this activity, if you’re lucky you’ll eventually get to meet someone for coffee.

The Harvard researchers have designed a new system called “Virtual Dates”, where the standard chat interface is replaced by a richer client that [provides] ” pictures around which people can socially interact, as if the couple is going to a museum together and chatting about the art work.” and has “a cute interface for people to converse, gesture, and even ‘chase each other.’”

This sounds interesting, but it’s only one part of the picture. You’ll still have to go through the whole searching, marketing and emailing process before you can initiate the “virtual date”. There needs to be a better way, that’s inspired by how people initiate social interaction in real life.

It remains a challenge for researchers and entrepreneurs to come up with a better version of online dating.  Someone can make a lot of money if they solve this problem well.

I’ve been spending some time working in a number of mom-n-pop coffee shops in Greenwich Village lately. The particular coffee shops in question conveniently provide free wireless and an abundance of outlets. For a $2.25 cup of iced coffee, you can work several hours.

Consequently, these establishments are usually packed with hip-looking people pounding away at their Macbook Pros. I’ve observed that, except in the morning, very few customers take their coffee to go.  So it seems these establishments are really in the business of renting temporary office space, at a rent of less than a buck an hour. That can’t be good for business, because all the real office space tends to be a bit more expensive, and doesn’t come with a barista.

I’d like it to be easier to get a table, and I want them to stay in business.

So I hope they increase their prices.

Almost all blogs are organized chronologically, kind of like the news ticker in Times Square. They focus on what’s newest, and anything that’s old is relegated to the black hole known as the “Archives”.

This is a shame because a lot of the most interesting and insightful writing on blogs has long-lasting value. For instance, here’s a great article on search engine optimization, but it’s buried under ‘General’. It would have been nice to find this a few weeks ago when I was actually looking for information on this topic.

Compare how blogs are structured this to traditional, “Web 1.0″ style content sites, which nearly always include a hierarchy of categories and subcategories. The best blogs do this, and offer multiple ways to find postings. Apartment Therapy, for example, does a good job of categorizing by stores, services, house tours, and other topics.

Search engines offer little help. Technorati generally returns an irrelevant batch of results, sorted by date, with no concept of relevancy or page rank. Google searches the entire web, returning a giant mishmash of results. There’s no way to express the fact that I’m searching for information as opposed to products or businesses. Hopefully the search engines will step up to the challenge and make the wealth of information in blog archives easier to find.

One of my sites, a version of Wolfenstein 3D written in 5K of Javascript, was picked up by Digg the other day. I wrote this game about 3 years ago, so I’m not sure how people found it, but the traffic has sure picked up, from about 1000 pageviews a day to 75,000.