An interlude from “serious business”, a bit of light-hearted thought…
This started with a random tweet of mine:
I see tons of “twitter for business” tips and links. I want to see “twitter for dating” apps
I’m hardly the first to float the idea of using Twitter for dating; I’ve seen a number of thoughts from Howard Lindzon on the subject, Aaron Chua mentioned an idea using Twitter plus a “virtual gift” component as foundation for a dating service, and Olivia Hayes mentioned Twitter as part of the broader opportunity to use social media to find dates, to which I left the following comment:
But think if Twitter could match up substance better; everyone that uses the web (including Twitter) creates a lot of information about themselves that could be very powerful to use in matching up people.
We don’t need to replace the serendipity of life, just add to it…
There’s even an old, abandoned @twirting account (Twitter + flirting), indicating an old idea.
After my first tweet about my desire to see a “Twitter for dating” service I traded ideas with Scott Lundgren (@capitalfellow on Twitter), and since neither of us is really going to do anything with the ideas, we decided we would open up the conversation to a broader audience. If you feel like doing anything with it, go for it; all I ask is that I get a free account [1]…
Basically, it’s just a big database that collects information on people that want to use @TwitterDating and then matches up people based on their supplied personal information and a magical contextual analysis of people’s last 1-2 pages of tweets to create potential matches.
After that, @Twitterdating passes on the information on potential matches using the direct message backchannel and allows people to follow up on their own, perhaps direct messaging through @Twitterdating to eliminate the need for the public follow to create the backchannel conversation path.
Anyway: I’ve tried to do is condense the key points from our email conversations to focus on the key points; and to be clear, most of the real thinking is from Scott…
Key Points
- “The real “juice” of the application has to be the contextual analysis of one’s tweets for the matching”
- What fundamental pieces of information does one need to make a date/no date decision? Which ones are missing from Twitter? How can those be added? Hashtags? Custom application that uses Twitter for message passing & discovery?
- How can one parse intention from content?
Interaction Model
- Express interest: I follow @twitterdating
- Supply additional information: I d @twitterdating the necessary additional information, including my sex, my desired sex, geo, age, etc.
- Collect additional information: integrate Facebook Connect et. al. to access and collect relevant personal information?
- Contextual analysis: @Twitterdating indexes Twitter data page of users that have expressed interest (by following @twitterdating) and the additional information supplied to create a user profile. Past tweets are then indexed with the matching user profiles to create the content necessary to match people.
- Introduction: Twitterdating bot sends d to people to introduce, explaining why (in 140 characters) they might be interested in the other person, without giving away the other person’s username. If both people d back to @twitterdating indicating they want to hear more, both users receive a d with a link to a page explaining the match and giving the basic user profile details and twitter IDs to allow users to carry on the conversation themselves.
Implications
- Non-public intent: only the user knows they have expressed interest to participate, and the user information is not supplied to the public. Easier for people to try and test without people knowing they are trying, and keeping the information private reduces the incentive to game or lie on user profiles.
- Links create destinations: using the link approach allows @twitterdating to provide a destination page with more information for the users that can also be monetized using highly-targeted advertising, per-interaction promotional strategies and per-month payment options. Imagine using Tipjoy as a micropayment mechanism to get access to potential matches by “paying” @twitterdating…
- Link pages can pull in information from other, non-Twitter sites: if the user provides additional data on their profile with links to other pages, the pages will be able to pull in other data from Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect (right?).
- Profiles can store user preferences: users could select notification frequency and store potential matches to allow users to look back at suggested matches and the reasons why they were matched, helping users modify what they tweet about.
Comparisons and Reference points
Extensions
- Could Twitter be used to match up business partners in the same way, using contextual analysis of tweets, links, user data and location to parse intent, capabilities and potential partnerships?
Thoughts?
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[1] Seriously. I could use it.
