Earlier tonight I watched the CNBC special Love at First Byte, and want to write about it while it is fresh in my mind.

I thought it was a very well put together piece, highlighting the tremendous growth of the online dating business (already a $2 billion dollar industry), exploring the various forms of science and math used in creating the algorithms of many dating sites, and raising some doubt on the validity of these algorithms.

(While 4-week-old TruConnection.com didn’t get any coverage (wait ’til next year) I was pleasantly surprised to see that two of the experts interviewed have responded to my past Emails and expressed some interest in what we are doing.)

Anyway, a few takeaways I had from this documentary I would like to share:

- The major dating sites seem to be dueling each other in who can come up with the best algorithm to predict a match. The CEO of one popular free dating site described his team of brainiacs as ‘engineering the next great relationship.’ He went on to insist that the computers are essentially better predictors of a match because they have more data points.

- Duke Psychology professor Dan Ariely — who expressed doubt that dating algorithms could ever ‘know enough’ to be truly effective — extensively researched what makes people ‘most appealing’ in dating profiles. He discussed that, for women seeking men, salary and height prevailed. He even calculated that an inch of a man’s height was ‘worth’ a certain income amount in the eyes of other members. He also said education was important for women seeking men, but of ‘no value’ to men seeking women. As superficial as all that sounds, his point seemed to be that perusing these detailed profiles leaves a member no choice but to make superficial judgments. He went on to state that science in matchmaking is still far from being accurate.

- Ariely touched on the concept of dating sites marketing their complex, scientifically proven algorithms in such a way that it is has a ‘self-fulfilling effect’ on its customers. In other words, according to Ariely, these algorithms are acting as a placebo. They may not truly match two soul mates, but they help convince members they are doing so.

- I was very surprised to hear that the matches E-Harmony provides members might actually be non-subscribers (people on the ‘free’ edition of the site who can look at, but not communicate with, other members). So you might get a match that would have to become a paying subscriber just to respond to you. In general, I think the documentary was actually very critical of E-Harmony relative to its peers

- I had never heard of ‘Facemate’ before. It is “a revolutionary new dating site that uses facial recognition technology to identify partners more likely to ignite real passion.” That certainly is a…different…approach

- The founder of a innovative mobile application that essentially helps single people meet others in the area by displaying just their photo and location discussed the issue of relying on self-description in finding a match. He made a point that they don’t bother with profiles since it is very difficult for a person to be honest when creating one; in other words, self-description lends itself to subjectivity.

- One of the experts said computers ‘are not good at emotions or feelings’. They can collect and interpret data points, but they are missing the element of human intuition.

The basis of TruConnection.com is that these algorithms, while popular and well-marketed, are fundamentally faulty. That a computer cannot be trusted to find you a match even if you plug in every single human characteristic possible. And you should not feel that, by exploring online dating, you need to be entering this sort of cold, un-romantic place where hundreds of techies crunch numbers to find you Mr or Mrs. Right. No — as successful as online dating has been, it can and should be done differently.

We feel that your photo + how you express yourself through writing (whether short, twitter-like posts, or longer pieces of writing), or other creative outlets (artwork, photography), say more about who you are than self-description or ‘data points’ ever could. It’s not perfect. It’s not for everyone. But, to me, it is a much better first impression and foundation for a meaningful relationship than relying on teams of mathematicians to ‘engineer the next great relationship.’

- Mike

TruConnection.com launched twenty-one days ago. We now have 150 active members, adding several more each day. As we continue to grow, we want to provide incentives to current and future members to ensure their experience on the site is positive.

Accordingly, we will soon be partnering with local merchants to provide discounts to our members. We will work with select restaurants, bars, museums, sport venues, and other popular locations in and around New York City and Boston, MA to sponsor dates. The discount will apply only if both parties are TruConnection.com members.

We will be polling current members on which type of venues will be most appealing. On the website, the selected venues will be listed each week under Weekly Deals ( http://www.truconnection.com/weekly-deals).

We are still working out the logistics, but I write this now to give everyone an idea of what’s on the road map. Ultimately, I hope to be working with a large selection of venues to give our members a multitude of options for discounted first dates.

-Mike

Mike@TruConnection.com

Last week, the New York Times published an article on online dating by two psychology professors, entitled The Dubious Science of Online Dating:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/opinion/sunday/online-dating-sites-dont-match-hype.html .

In the article, the authors question the fundamental concept of utilizing algorithms or other formulas to find compatibility or romantic connection between two single people. Regarding the claims of popular mainstream dating sites, the authors state: “the past 80 years of scientific research about what makes people romantically compatible suggests that such sites are unlikely to do what they claim to do.”

We’ve seen this before. More and more, we are hearing experts and psychologists question the validity of online dating algorithms. The notion of plugging in your personal characteristics into a formula, answering a series of canned questions, and letting the system find you a match, is starting to sound impractical. It is starting to seem like dating sites are using these formulas merely as a marketing tool to gain members. Worse, some have suggested there is a more sinister mindset behind these algorithms; make people feel as though they are not smart enough or capable to know what they want in a romantic partner, so they need to rely on teams of psychologists with impressive credentials.

I Emailed one of the authors of the aforementioned article. I described my reasons for creating TruConnection.com — that I feel matchmaking algorithms based on self-description and questionnaires are inherently faulty, and that there is a better way to make a meaningful connection when meaning online. I suggested that one’s creative self-expression + photo (and only these things) is the best first impression when meeting online.

He wrote back. He said my approach was novel, and it was plausible that people can learn more about each other through my method than the standard methods of online dating. He added there has not been any research done on the matter, as it is a new concept.

I urge anyone who is considering online dating to give TruConnection.com a try. We launched on January 30th, and currently have just under 150 members.

-Mike

Mike@TruConnection.com

Efficiency is an odd modern phenomenon. It makes sense in some areas of life, but its existence has become so pervasive that the tendency has been to “improve” all things by making them more efficient. Food, entertainment, even communication have been broken apart and reconstructed to allow for maximal use with minimal effort in little time. Efficiencies have made life easier in many ways, but with any step forward, with any choice to move in one direction, there are inevitable losses. When you choose the faster A, you lose the slower B, C, and D. When you choose the efficiency of a microwave dinner, you lose the complexity of flavor and the joy of preparation a home cooked meal brings. When you choose the efficiency of a text message, you lose the depth of a conversation. And when you choose the efficiency of an algorithm or checklist when meeting people online, you lose the human agency, the choice to connect with someone because of something beyond his or her statistics, beyond formulas.

Some things are worth speeding up, but a lot of things are worth enjoying, are worth waiting for. I like to think of TruConnection.com as the perfect venue for launching connections that take time. Relationships are complex in their development but simple at their core. People want to meet real people! People are constantly growing and changing, and detailed dating profiles take the tiniest snapshot of a person at a given point in time, doing little to show the complexity of that person’s thought processes, how they see the world. TruConnection gives people the chance to speak for themselves beyond a mundane list of details about their lives. I find relationships most powerful when they let you see beyond your situation, to something more meaningful, more powerful. How can people make that kind of connection when one snapshot is matched with another based on little more than common interests?

People are more than just their profiles. And that is why we’ve created TruConnection.com

-Chris

A few years back I had a Valentine’s Day date with a girl I’d never met, set up through a mutual friend. It was arranged at the last minute, which is a good thing, so I didn’t even have time to think about it. It was a unique opportunity to meet someone new, make an impression, and if nothing else, walk away with a story to tell.

With less than 24 hours to put the evening together, I set to work prioritizing what needed to be done. There was critical business to attend to—finding a car, making dinner reservations, and ironing clothes. Then there were the important items I unfortunately had to bypass, due to time—haircut, polishing shoes, and arranging a bouquet of rare wild flowers.

Twice on the way to pick her up I forgot her name. It was an uncommon name dominated by vowels so I had to repeat it aloud a dozen times to make it stick. Her place was just blocks from the restaurant so I figured we’d have some time to kill before heading out. In tow I had some cheap corner-store flowers and a very nice bottle of red wine, which I held label facing out in case she’d notice.

She greeted me at the door with a gorgeous smile and sincere Hello, accepting my gifts and giving thanks. What a beginning, I thought. We kept the intros brief and I waited on the couch while she finished her hair and fed the cat. The place was quiet and smelled nice, so I sat there staring at my reflection in the TV screen, thinking back on all the years prior and realizing I had done absolutely nothing for those Valentine’s Days, not since high school at least. This didn’t matter anyway and when she suddenly emerged from the hallway looking like an angel, I didn’t care about the past at all, let alone past Valentines Days. I complimented her and we were on our way.

This pleasantly low key, neutral beginning to our night was in no way an indicator of what remained, as the night unfolded into one moment of awkward discomfort after another. In fact I cut it short and took her home early, coming very close to asking for my bottle of red back, but decided to leave it alone. We were two strangers joined together momentarily to demonstrate to each other what extreme incompatibility really looks like.

Now, years later, thinking back on it, I wonder what it has to do with mainstream online dating, since the internet itself played no role in this encounter. It was a mutual friend, remember, who initiated the connection.  In an eerie way, he acted as that third party matchmaking software that claims to eliminate the labor involved in finding someone special. This isn’t to say the date was forced upon us, but rather, our compatibility was almost assumed to be, simply because we belonged to a common network. The experience proved a number of things. For one, physical appearance, while important for so many reasons, can end up being something of zero significance when the chemistry is just that bad. Secondly, I could’ve had an entire roster of this girl’s traits and tendencies to examine before we went out, and it still wouldn’t have made any difference. And yet, as it relates to the online datingsphere, this approach is just what the mainstream sites are peddling.

Alternatively, with TruConnection.com’s new approach, the user is afforded a refreshing sense of control. Through creative self expression, or just regular daily thoughts and meditations, no matter how trivial or profound, a person is able to assemble an authentic, powerful presence online. TruConnection.com’s new approach brings the experience of meeting someone online closer to earth, which is to say, closer to how you already function as a human among humans.

But back to that Valentine’s Day from years ago: more often than not it’s beneficial to thrust yourself into an uncomfortable situation and experiment with the trials and sometimes comical outcomes within that environment. I’ll always recognize Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to do something wild, or if there’s a special lady involved, to celebrate our friendship and have a good time.

-Derek

There was an excellent article this morning in the Health section of CNN.com, entitled ‘Psychologists Highlight Pitfalls of Online Dating’ ( http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/06/health/online-dating-pitfalls/index.html?hpt=hp_c3).

In the article, experts discuss the psychological component of online dating — in particular, the process of viewing detailed member profiles.

This article could be an advertisement for TruConnection.com. It raises many of the issues with mainstream online dating site which were the genesis of our site. I have selected a few excerpts from this article to expand on:

The abundance of profiles online also may make daters too picky and judgmental, the authors say. The sheer number of options can be overwhelming, and the ease with which people can sift through profiles — and click on to the next one — may lead them to “objectify” potential partners and compare them like so many pairs of shoes.

Income, education, social habits, drink/smoke, height, body type…all of the characteristics that comprise a typical dating profile can lead to this objectifying of people. The analogy to comparing pairs of shoes may seem extreme, but really, what’s the difference? In both cases a person is sifting through samples and choosing the best one based on little more than a list of attributes and a picture.

On mathematical algorithms used to match people:

The authors of the review are skeptical of these claims. They weren’t able to find a single rigorous study showing the effectiveness of the algorithms, and other research suggests it’s extremely difficult to predict the likelihood that a relationship will succeed before two people meet.

“Not only is there no scientific evidence, despite the claims, [but] my team of co-authors have become pessimistic that there could ever be in principle an algorithm that could match people well based on the approaches these sites take,” Finkel says.

If you research online dating sites, you’ll find the majority are trying to one-up the rest by relying on more complex algorithms, more formulas, more scientists in a lab somewhere determining your matches. If you step back and think about it, the notion that a computer can match people based on ANY information is flawed. These algorithms seem to be more of a marketing tactic than a platform for matchmaking.

“Don’t focus on evaluating that person,” he says. “Can you laugh with that person? Can you feel simpatico with that person?”

This idea of connecting with someone emotionally is at the heart of TruConnection.com. I don’t pretend that viewing what someone writes or how they express themselves is going to necessarily be the best indicator for an emotional connection. But I truly believe it is the best first impression, and a much more valuable starting point than viewing a list of traits.

If you are a current member, I urge you to write and share as much as possible on the site. This will allow others to start getting to know YOU, not just facts about you, prior to meeting in person.

If you are not a member yet…sign up now! The site is free for members signing up prior to March 1st.

Mike

Mike@TruConnection.com

TruConnection.com launched on Monday, January 30th, as scheduled. We worked through some bugs the first few days, and while there are still some minor fixes to be made and feature enhancements on the way, we are now at a place where members can write, upload, and communicate with one another smoothly.

When we add new features or enhance existing ones, I will update members and post on this blog as well.

We encourage members to write (or upload existing creative work) as often as they can. We have added a daily Suggested Writing Topic, which is found at the top of the Home page. The more you write and express yourself on the site, the better other members can get to know you.

TruConnection.com currently has over 70 members, and our goal remains 1,000 members by March 1st.

Please continue to spread the word!

- Mike