Gelato Blog

Helping people date better through the realtime web.

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  • Nominate Gelato! “The Crunchies” Awards 2009-11-30

    Nominations for the 2009 Crunchies Awards are now open, and we’d be ecstatic if you’d consider nominating Gelato for the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” category Crunchie.

    The Crunchies are essentually the “Oscars” for the tech world, hosted annually by Gigaom, TechCrunch, and Venture Beat. Nominations are open through midnight PST December 4, 2009.

    If you think Gelato is worthy of being included among the “Best Bootstrapped Startup” Crunchie, we’d be honored if you’d nominate us.

    Thanks in advance for all your support!

    The Gelato Team

    Read More

  • We’ve Been Nominated! 2009-11-30

    We’ve Been Nominated!

    We couldn’t be more excited. The Internet Dating Conference and Online Personals Watch are hosting the first annual Online Dating Industry Awards!  And we’ve been nominated!

    Gelato has been nominated for the “Best Up and Coming Dating Site”. We are humbled and honored just to be nominated.  Just think of how excited we’d get if we won.

    To win, we are going to need your help. You, your friends, everyone you know. So please pass the word and vote at the iDate 2010 conference page.

    Voting will be held between now and January 7, 2010. Please note that you will receive an email verification of your vote, you must VERIFY your vote for it to count.

    You’ll find us on last category on the form under “Best Up and Coming Dating Site”.

    Place Your Vote Now!

  • New Updates: We’ve Been Busy! 2009-11-24

    We launched about two months ago, and the buzz has been nothing but great. We’re really excited, but there is so much more we’re doing.

    About two weeks ago, Steve Odom talked me into joining Gelato and taking over the social media aspects.  This was mainly so Steve could spend more of his time working on Gelato enhancing its features and adding on new ones. I am amazed at what Steve managed to do so far. He is one talented and smart guy. I’m really excited to be working with Steve Odom, and very excited about Gelato Dating.

    I’ve seen the evolution of online dating from MUDs and MOOs of the days of Telnet, to the modern eHarmony’s & MatchDotCom’s, and I am very excited about this newest evolution of stream-dating with Gelato Dating. The ease of finding someone you’d want to date is only becoming faster and easier with each evolution.

    We’ve been working on some great new features and updates with even more to come. We’ve added easier ways to contact your interests through the Find page, and just this week Steve added the “Favorites” section.  Now once you find someone interesting, you can add them to a feed in your “Favorites” so you can get to know them even better.

    Over the next few weeks, in addition to our Gelato news, we’ll be adding our own advice and opinion blog with everything you ever wanted to know about dating. Any questions, topics, or matters that you’d like discussed, please feel free to shoot me email.

    I am also working on Twitter lists of the best Dating Advice Twitterers, and a list of the best Real Dating Blog Twitterers who blog about their own dating experiences. There is nothing quite like getting good advice, and seeing how others are managing it in the world of dating.  If you or someone you know should be on these lists, but isn’t yet, send us a tweet with the information. I’d love to hear from you.

    I am very excited to be onboard, and hope you’re having a great experience with Gelato.

    **

    Yvonne Young, Gelato Social Media Director

    Yvonne Young is a pseudo-geek with a background in sales and marketing, a degree in Organizational Communications, and dating experience from the land of HardKnocks.

  • We’re Launched! Thanks DEMO. 2009-10-05

    What an exciting 12 days it’s been since Gelato went live! Not only did we grab the attention of those who have decided to give our site a try, but also the news outlets. We received excellent press coverage from Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, CNet, GigaOm, the NY Times, and many more. I’m so thankful for the users who took the chance on a new type of online dating and to the media for the coverage.

    I would like to especially thank Matt Marshall, Chris Shipley, and the entire DEMO crew for allowing us to launch Gelato at this year’s conference. What a freakin’ well-managed event. What a great community. What a wonderful feeling of kinship with the other entrepreneurs who launched companies. Instead of competitiveness, there was a good-spirited energy of support. In fact, I couldn’t help but notice that the energy at DEMO reminded me a lot of how it feels in Gelato’s hometown of Austin right now among individuals in the startup community. The words cooperative, scrappy, bootstrapped, helpful, and happy are the words that could readily be applied to not only the Austin startup scene, but also the community of folks at DEMO.

    I’m not surprised that I have similar feelings for both DEMO and Austin. The warm, fun-loving and down to earth vibe that makes me love Austin, was also present at DEMO. I can’t help but think that the atmosphere at DEMO was a strong reflection of long-time DEMO organizer Chris Shipley’s personality. She’s kind, welcoming, and doesn’t put on any airs. She could totally be from Austin.

    But it’s more than just one person. Certainly there’s something else that created this shared vibe. I began to think about the similarities. In the last few years, both the DEMO and Austin startup community seem to have lost some traction. The success of TechCrunch50 sucked some of the cachet and companies away from DEMO. Likewise in Austin, lack of an active consumer internet investment community seemed to quiet the startup buzz in the middle part of the decade. The cool thing is the lull gave rise to a very strong bootstrapped, cooperative ethos here in Austin. We help each other out. We want each other to succeed. We’re scrappy. We’ve emerged stronger for the lull. DEMO felt the exact same way. I truly couldn’t be any happier to have been part of such an amazing event. Thank you, DEMO!

    ps Here’s Gelato’s 90 second pitch from DEMO:

  • Authenticity is our middle name 2009-09-23

    Fake or misleading profiles are one of my main frustrations with other dating sites. I’ve heard more than once from my female friends that they’ve known married men to create dating profiles that show a relationship status of “single”.

    Suspicion about the authenticity of online profiles, particularly in regard to relationship status, is widespread among both male and female users of online dating sites. In fact, a 2005 customer satisfaction survey by Keynote Research found:

    “Sixty-one percent [of online daters] believe others are misrepresenting themselves. And a whole 30 percent are married or live with a significant other.”


    So here at Gelato, we’ve created a feature to help validate a person’s authenticity, and reward them with points. It’s called SCOOP, and it’s a scoring system designed to solve the problem of inaccurate profiles. SCOOP stands for ‘Social Confidence of Online Profile’ and it utilizes a person’s social network to measure a profile’s validity. For example, a person gets 25 points for adding an authenticated Facebook account that has more than 25 friends to their lifestream. Another 25 points for adding a Twitter account with more than 25 followers. As another way to add trustworthiness, you get an additional 25 points if your Facebook relationship status matches your relationship status on Gelato.

    Check out my profile to see an example of a SCOOP score.

    For additional validity and SCOOP points, Gelati (as we like to call Gelato members) can enlist the help of friends. A Gelato member can send a link to their Twitter followers and Facebook friends asking them to validate their Gelato profile. The member gets 30 SCOOP points for each of their friends/followers that validates their profile.

    Here’s a sample link explaining how my Twitter and Facebook friends would validate my profile: http://ge.la.to/likes/steve-odom?validate_me=true

    There’s no doubt that as Gelato grows, spammers will try to game the system and create fake profiles. However, to have a high SCOOP score, those folks will need to have added authenticated Twitter and Facebook accounts with a decent number of friends as well as having other Twitter/Facebook accounts validate their profiles. That’s a lot of work put forth in an effort to be a fake.

    As is the case with many of the site’s features, we expect the SCOOP scoring system to grow and evolve over time. As always, I’d love to hear your ideas on what we might add as a way to foster confidence in the Gelato community we’re creating.

  • I’m laid back and like long walks on the beach. 2009-09-21

    My Match.com profile began: “My profile seems like most of the rest that you read here. If I list my interests, I feel like an Austin cliche. I’m “down to earth” and “laid back”. I like long walks with my dog, the outdoors, and exercising of course.”

    I noticed that most profiles on Match were very similar. After a while, I ended up just looking at the photos and a few key items like political affiliation and religion, disregarding the majority of the description altogether. Not surprisingly, this led to a problem of too many dates where there were few common interests and no connection.

    The flat feeling of many online profiles and the inability to flesh out what a person is really about is common in traditional dating websites. In a Winter, 2008 Journal of Interactive Marketing [pdf link] article the authors write:


    We suggest that online dating frequently fails to meet user expectations because people, unlike many commodities available for purchase online, are experience goods: Daters wish to screen potential romantic partners by experiential attributes (such as sense of humor or rapport), but online dating Web sites force them to screen by searchable attributes (such as income or religion).


    “Experiential attributes” are exactly what I find when I use the real-time web. Take Twitter, for example—I found out that if I follow someone for a couple of weeks, I feel like I really know them. I get a sense of what they like, what they do during the day, and even what they complain about. Still, Twitter provides only one view into someone’s personality. Tack on Flickr photos, and you add another layer to the personality. Heck, show me what music someone listens to on Last.fm and what television shows someone watches on Hulu, and I have a pretty good idea of whether or not there will be a good connection.

    Everyone wants to go out on enjoyable dates, with enjoyable conversation about shared interests. Unfortunately, traditional dating websites don’t allow for truly getting a sense of the person behind the photos and the words before you get to that first date.

    Gelato is changing the way people think about dating profiles. Instead of finding people based on static, written profiles that all sound like most of the rest, Gelato gives single-people the opportunity to see much more authentic and dynamic representations of potential dates. Find people based on what they are actually doing; not what they wrote about themselves 9 months ago.

    That’s what Gelato is about: allowing people to find people, not profiles.

  • Online dating and real-time search sittin’ in a tree, t-a-l-k-i-n-g. 2009-09-20

    The other night I was watching Project Runway. (Ok. I admit it. I know I’m a dude, but I really like that show.). As I often do during the commercials, I flipped over to Twitter to see what other people were saying about the program. And as is often the case, some of the Twitter comments were really funny and insightful.

    Sometimes I’ll join in and post a comment and someone I don’t know responds back or retweets it. I love it. I feel connected. And being able to connect with people while events are happening is truly the power of the real-time web.

    Gelato is bringing the real-time web to dating. I might add a filter to my Gelato search that says “show me women, 25-35, near Austin, politically liberal, that have recently mentioned ‘Project Runway’”. I could then see what women on Gelato meet that criteria engage with one of them in a dialog while the show is actually going on. The equation is simple: shared interests + real-time web communication = immediate connection and conversation.

    Maybe you don’t like Project Runway like me, or, maybe you’re a woman. So instead you could type in, ‘show me men within five miles who have mentioned animal rescue’. Or gardening. Or Twitter. Or whatever. If they have mentioned your interest in their Gelato lifestream then this is who will show up in your filter.

    One of my frustrations with the other dating sites is how static they can be. The profiles hardly ever change. Like me, I wrote my profile on Match.com two years ago and I’ve only added a picture or two since then. When I went out on dates, I found again and again that we pretty much started at a very basic level of conversation, like, “So what do you do?” Dating aside, the great thing about Twitter and Facebook is that they allow me to have conversations at a more personal level with my friends when I see them in person. No more - “hey, what have you been up to?” Instead it’s- “hey, how was that trip to Europe?”

    Gelato brings that more personal conversation to dating, right from the start. If you have just listened to the new Yo La Tengo album, your date will know that if you have added Last.fm to your Gelato lifestream. On your first date, you’re able to talk about the album instead of - “so what kind of music do you like?”

    The realtime web allows for better dates and better conversations. Gelato is making that happen.

  • Another online dating site? 2009-07-31

    When I tell people that I’m building an online dating site one of the comments I get is that it is a very crowded space. In one way, it is crowded. There are hundreds of dating sites from large sites like Match and eHarmony, down to the very narrow niches like farmers only and goth scene. Why build another one?

    The answer is that I could not find one that I liked. Match and eHarmony are great because that’s where most people are. They have the best selection. But those sites feel like they haven’t changed since the early 2000’s.

    I like Twitter and Facebook; Netflix and Hulu; Pandora and Flickr and all the other places where I spend most of my free time these days. I’m not a farmer or into goth. I’m into the interwebs. Where’s the online dating site for me?

    If I follow someone on Twitter for a couple of weeks, you know what? I feel I sort of know them. If I look at someone’s Flickr photos, I get a sense of who they are. Show me someone’s favorite bands, and I can have a pretty good idea of whether they are a good fit with me. Much more so than any static profile written 6 months ago.

    I also found 2 problems with online dating that I wanted to solve. First, it’s a real chore to create a new profile at the other sites. All that writing. Blech. Gelato solves that problem. You can have a rich profile in under 2 minutes.

    Second, there are a lot of fake profiles on the other dating sites. This is a bigger problem for women. Men lie about whether they are married. Scammers create fake profiles. People post old pictures when they were slimmer or had more hair. On Gelato, we use a person’s social network to validate their profile. We call this SCOOP points. “Social Confidence of Online Profile.” We verify their facebook account and if they have more than 25 friends, they get SCOOP points. If they authenticate at twitter and have more than 25 followers, they get SCOOP points.

    There are a lot of unique things we’re doing to create the simplest, safest, and richest online dating site available. We are off to a great start but want to hear your thoughts.