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.
