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.
