Launching a new concept: A communities driven dating site
Community sites meet a dating service?
What is it all about?
Everybody has these things that are really important to them when looking for a mate. Each one of us is different. We engage in different lifestyles, habits, hobbies, and practices; We have different ideologies and beliefs; We differ in our personality in countless ways; and we have our specific sexual preferences. All these MATTER when looking for a spouse!
Yet dating sites typically have a “one size fits all” questionnaire with a handful of parameters to fill in. Of course, you can write about yourself in the free text area, but you can hardly ever SEARCH for like minded people by anything else than the standard parameters: height / age / body type etc.
On the other hand, the internet hosts countless online communities, people who gathered around their special interests and characteristics, but they are not really dating sites, are they?
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a dating site with multiple questionnaires?
Where online communities could define their own questionnaire, and all users who chose to would take them (and people just love to take questionnaires!)?
Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to include in the search form something like: “find my a user that answered “x” on question “y” in questionnaire “z”?
Wouldn't it be wonderful – to enjoy this ability to search by the parameters that matter TO YOU, yet on the other hand enjoy the large statistical exposure of a “mainstream” fully featured dating site?
And of course, if these questionnaires are evolve some info you don't want just everybody to see, to set up permissions to who can view your answers (or see that you took this questionnaire at all!
The programming to fire this project is almost complete. (yet right now you will only see a screen shot if you visit its domain) All needed now – is the general community – and this community – to embrace this project, and become an active part of it!
The name of this project is Open-Personals.com
Currently supporting English speaking countries, but may be translated in the future to other languages / countries as well...
But keep that thought in mind, because there is more..:
The non-commercial model
In an ideal world everybody would be open and honest about who they are and what they are looking for. People would help other people just for the sake of helping out, and making others happy. Things would be based on social justice, cooperation, contribution, and commitment.
Most dating sites are commercial, in the sense that the ability to USE THEM FULLY costs money. It is a business. You pay money in return for the ability to contact other users. It's not like they allow you to contact the other user because they see an opportunity to help and are keen to do so; and it is not like you support this website because you are involved with its success somehow. Business is business.
The Open-Personals Model.
Inspired by the “open source” idea, Open-Personals is based on community commitment, support, and involvement.
In the software community: The open source model asserts that the source code of a software is available to anyone for free; That the use of the software is generally free; that volunteer programmers are invited to contribute their “plugins” or “modules” (and often actually be a key part in the core development); and that development is often supported by donations. Obviously, some people feel enough identification with these projects to donate to them.
And in the general singles community? Well, you are involved! You, the members of different online communities, define the questionnaires (which are, in a sense, contributed modules!); The use of the service is free; and yes, since there are bills to pay at the end of the month, and many man-hours behind the operation of the site – donations will be gladly accepted... It won't have to be anything fancy, but we are sure that if you meet someone nice through the website, you will be kind enough to donate a small amount (securely, through PayPal) to support this project.
We are looking into the option for people to sponsor exposures of a banner from a non-profit social justice group / organization to their liking (and hence support both the non profit organization and the project), but that is for the future. Right now it will be based on donations.
Epilogue: what the internet can and can not do:
Cyberspace is, obviously, not the real world. The internet lucks those fine and vital forms of interaction, tone of voice, body language – and other things that make CHEMISTRY between people.
What the internet CAN give you is two things:
1.Statistical strength: You have “access” to a lot more other people, which you wouldn't have access to otherwise. All you have to do is find the needle to in the hay stack.... which leads us to:
2.Automation: Ways to automatically filter out those obviously less compatible, and keep those that have certain quantifiable characteristics.
The Internet can find you quite a few “compatible” matches, and hopefully, you will find from within those matches somebody you will actually fall in love with.
Open-personals is a concept that addresses these two issues: it allows you to search and filter for the right people in a more flexible way then ever seen before; And being free, it has a large potential for rapid growth, and a large base of users. Also, given that it is free, it is a more “sticky” dating site than others. In payed dating sites, not all users are really active there all the time, because they don't have access to all the services all the time. This is obviously not the case with Open-Personals.com
