The online dating scene, if you didn’t already know, is a multi-billion dollar industry and has been popular for quite some time. It hasn’t hurt to have films like 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, with Megan Ryan and Tom Hanks. While the movie itself goes well beyond online dating, it makes up a core aspect of the film, and hence its name. TBS channel was showing the movie yet again, and sucker that I am for the subtle chemistry between these two actors, I watched it over again for the umpteenth time. It made me wonder how, or whether, the movie would have been different if VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) phone calling had been available back then.
Well, Nora Ephron hasn’t yet made a movie called You’ve Got VoIPmail, but there are online dating sites popping up that integrate Skype PC-calling into the website. One example is Verbdate.
With Verbdate, you first download the Skype VoIP software, create a Skype profile, then sign up for a free membership on Verbdate. When you build your Verbdate profile, you enter your Skype username. When someone has seen your profile, they can send you a member email. If they want to actually talk to you, they send you a “wink”. If you’re interested, you in turn give them your Skype username, and they Skype-call you at an agreed upon time.
It’s an idea whose time has come. Verbdate’s unfortunate flaw is that the interface seems kind of awkward. The Google Maps mashup is a great concept, but my attempts to try it, repeatedly, were extremely frustrating. The general idea is that you pinpoint your city location on the world map, and then search for someone fitting certain criteria and who lives within a certain radius of you. Great concept, poor execution. The result is that, in my trials, I kept getting people who were thousands of miles away. (The site is Canadian, based presumably in the province of British Columbia, where the Google Maps seem to default for your starting pinpoint.)
Still, online dating is popular enough - take Markus Frind’s PlentyofFish, which generates US$10,000/day in ad revenue - that I don’t doubt Verbdate will work out their glitches. Either that or someone else will come up with a better site, possibly one that utilizes the video calling capabilities of Sightspeed.
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July 23rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Hello Raj,
Thanks for visiting verbdate and thanks for the post. With regards to your experience with the google maps mashup it is simply that we have only recently begun and it is a matter of members in your area. We expect that as the site grows you will begin to see more profiles in your area. In the meantime we have found that people all over the world are contacting each other even if they are far apart! Thanks again and cheers from Canada!
J
July 23rd, 2006 at 6:05 pm
Thanks for the heads up, John.
BTW, for anyone who is interested, Skype offers a free API (Application Programmer Interface) in case you would like to integrate Skype VoIP calling into your own web services.
July 25th, 2006 at 1:06 am
Update: Well don’t I feel dumb. Markus Frind says on another site, in the comments, that plentyoffish.com has voice, video etc. Well, I haven’t tried that site out myself, hence why I didn’t mention the features in the above article. Bad research. My apologies.