Little Black Book and a Dark Little Secret

Rumor has it that Match.com is coming out with a facebook app called "Little Black Book". Details on it are a tad fuzzy, but it sounds like it will show other users who have installed Little Black Book in addition Match.com users.

Little Black Book lets Facebook users sign up to see the other Facebook users who hope to date someone. Once they're signed up, users of Little Black Book will receive potential matches among Facebook users and non-Facebook users who are signed up with Match.com.

This could be just what online dating needs. Match.com floods you with a wealth of details about a person and lets you search on minute details. "Hmm, why yes, I would only like to date people who are in Financial services. But no legal for me!" The problem is, of course, even if you do care a great deal about your date's profession, you probably don't regard paralegal vs partner in a law firm the same way. You can also see if your diet matches your date's diet. I can just see someone now: "Well, sure, Suzie wasn't as well educated as I wanted, but her diet matched mine, and that's why we fell in love!"

So while Match.com shows you a suitor's carefully crafted profile, Facebook can give you a glimpse into their actual life. A Facebook profile is maintained for the purposes of sharing one's life with their friends. It contains actual photos - not just the top two or three shots. A comment on a person's wall such as "Remember that He's always there. We'll pray for you!" or "Do you remember anything from last night?" can tell you if a person is immersed in religion or partying (or both). Because Facebook is a platform for interacting with friends, it can tell you more about who a person actually is. Match.com profile are written expressly for attracting strangers and therefore represent who a person wants to be. Little Black Book could breath a bit of real life into online dating.

Will Little Black Book break online dating's "don't ask, don't tell" policy?

A gay friend of mine uses online dating because it's hard to meet other gay men without going to gay bars - and that's not really his scene. A family member of mine uses it because, as a single parent, there aren't many options. Attractive, social, intelligent friends in their 20s - the people you would expect to never "need" it - use online dating because they are frustrated with the dating scene or just figure, "hey, why not?" Numerous friends and family members have found their spouse or long term partner from a dating service. In fact, according to one study, 12% of couples married in the last year met online. Wow.

Despite the fact that most people I know are using online dating services, and that it appears to be working, they will only admit to it very quietly - if at all. (Note how I carefully worded the above paragraph to ensure that I'm not pinpointing any specific person.) Online dating is like this dark little secret.

The problem is that Facebook apps typically thrive off word-of-mouth (eg, mini-feeds and invites). I added Fun Wall, SuperWall and Nicknames because I wanted read the message someone had left me. I added BillMonk because someone invited me to it. I added Percent because I saw it in someone's mini-feed.

It's a catch-22. If Little Black Book advertises you use it, then many people won't install it. If they don't advertise that you use it, people won't discover that it's out there.

Or, maybe, just maybe, Little Black Book will show that online dating doesn't have to be a dark little secret.

Linking for Dollars

[UPDATE: I emailed Linking for Dollars and they have now updated their code to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. They now fall within the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Nice work!]

Much like I nod my head to the inventor of Pet rocks, I would nod to whoever came up with Facebook gifts. If you can get people to pay $15 (adjusted for inflation) for a rock, or $1 to send an icon (eg, "gift") with a message, I say "bravo!" The sillier the idea, the more impressed I am when someone monetizes it. Really - I'm impressed with their brilliance in marketing.

In a similar fashion, I say "bravo" to Empowering Youth's Linking for Dollars* initiative. Empowering Youth* is, presumably, trying to raise its pagerank (or if not pagerank specifically, they're trying to market their company). Instead of paying people to link to them, which breaks Google Webmaster Guidelines, they'll donate $1 to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for each person that links to them. It doesn't seem quite so unethical if the money is going to a charity, does it?

Empowering Youth, Inc, is sponsoring an effort to raise funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Last year, "Linking for Dollars" raised $500! You can help. Empowering Youth will pay one dollar to St. Jude, just for posting this announcement. Details are here

However, all the reasons that search engines don't like paid links are in play here (read Matt Cutt's post about this). The basic idea is this: if I see John hanging out with Daniel, I will assume that John likes something about Daniel. Maybe he thinks Daniel is interesting, or smart, or funny, etc - I don't know what it means, but it probably means something positive about Daniel. If Daniel pays John to hang out with him, well, it doesn't really mean much, does it? Paid links are the same way, regardless of where the money goes.

Now, in all honesty, I don't think Linking for Dollars / Empowering Youth knows about any of this fancy search engine optimizer stuff. They may have never heard of paid links, and they probably don't know that it's "illegal." They probably said "hey, we want to get the name out about our company - and wouldn't it be great if we could do this in a charitable way?" They came up with a great way of doing this - but it just may be one that'll get their site dropped. Yikes!

So, bravo to Linking for Dollars. I applaud your creativity and your ability to align reader's charitable inclinations (and likely your own) with marketing your company. Frankly, I think charities would be more effective if they could better align people's "selfish" motivations with their own donation goals. But, you're still breaking the rules of the game - or at least the Google Webmaster Guidelines - by paying for links. Tsk tsk.

* Any links to Linking for Dollars and Empowering Youth use the rel="nofollow" attribute. I won't play in this pagerank game :-).

Gayle is... not agreeing with Facebook removing "is"

I woke up this morning, checked Facebook, and discovered that Facebook had removed 'is' from status messages.

Previously, because all status messages were preceded by "is", users have been forced to either reword their phrases to be grammatically correct (eg, "Gayle is looking for people to play soccer on Wednesday nights. Let her know!" instead of "Gayle: let me know if you want to play soccer on Wednesday nights."), or to deal with bad grammar. I personally was in the awkward rewording camp. No bad grammar for me!

Users had been fighting for this for a while via Facebook groups. While Facebook 'petitions' (aka, groups) can not save Darfur, elect Barack Obama elected (even if you are One Million Strong), or legalize gay marriage, it can in fact change Facebook.

It appears that I should have started my petition to keep 'is' in status messages while I had the chance. I think I'm one of the few people who don't support this change.

The Facebook 'is' was part of Facebook's personality - the awkwardly worded status messages, the "So-and-so is happy because she got admitted to Penn", and the people who would just say screw it and deal with their bad grammar. It's part of what made Facebook Facebook.

In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. The button is pretty silly:

1. You would only use if you know what the first result will be, in which case you probably would have bookmarked the page already.
   
2. It clutters up the interface with something that's rarely used.
   
3. It arguably costs Google money because it skips over search results, and therefore ads (or it would if people, you know, used it).
   

Any User Interface designer would tell you not to add such a button. But still, year after year, it remains. Why? Because it's what makes Google Google. It's "Googley".

Well, if you'll permit me to use Facebook as an adjective, 'is' is Facebooky. Of course, in a few months, it'll all seem silly. We'll forget that we ever awkwardly reworded our status, and high schoolers will relish with writing "Ana: omg Mrs. Crawford is so weird LOL!" instead of the more sophisticated "Ana is thinking that Mrs. Crawford is so weird." What's done is done - Facebook has given us more flexibility with status messages. What an application giveth it can't taketh away.

Blue Screens and Web Apps

My laptop, which I fear is on its last legs, got a little servicing today from Dell. It'd been blue screening frequently since, well, since Dell last visited me two months ago (broken fan -> overheating laptop). I'm going to assume that's just a coincidence, although the timing is suspicious...

I tried reinstalling windows first, of course, but then it blue screened when I tried to reinstall. Excellent! At least Dell can't tell me it's a software issue...

I ran some tests and then Dell ran some more tests, to discover that absolutely every test passed. Wonderful! (Paraphasing)

Gayle: "All the tests passed."
Dell: "Ok, well we'll send out a technician to replace the hard drive and the CPU."
Gayle: "Ok, but we ran two separate hard drive tests and they both passed."
Dell: "Sometimes the tests skip over things."
Read: Dell is taking shots in the dark right now. Excellent.

One new hard drive and reinstall later, I'm in the process of getting my computer back up to a liveable state. It's much easier now than it was a year or two ago. There's less to install because of web-based apps, and it's easier to reinstall those few things.

• Pictures: I use Picasa. Quick, easy install. Man I love Picasa / Picasaweb - have I mentioned that? More on that another time :-).
  
• Word Processing: Somewhere, amongst piles and piles of CDs, I have the Word and Excel. I think. Google Docs & Spreadsheets works better for most things anyway (since I can access my files from other computers), so I'll hold off on installing Office for now.
  
• Email: I weened myself off Outlook years ago (I used to be a big fan, but then it broke on me) and have been using Gmail for a long time.
  
• Calendar: Google Calendar. Love it!
• Web Browsing: Firefox. Installed.
  
• Programming: For non-work things, I use .NET and Visual Studio. I recently moved my two websites (Social/Conduct and CareerCup) over to ASP.NET 2.0, which means that I can just use Visual Studio Express. Good thing too - the regular Visual Studio took sooo long to install.
  
• IM: My friends are split between Google Talk, AIM and Windows Live Messenger.
  
• Google Talk: I do prefer the windows client, so I downloaded that - small, quick, easy.
  
• AIM: While a lot of applications don't significantly improve with each version, AIM was one of the few which actually got worse. Installing was always a hassle because you have to find the appropriately old version of AIM and then match that to the right version of DeadAIM (a plugin that adds some nice features). Gmail Chat now has AIM integration - I think I'll just stick with that.
• Windows Live Messenger: Oh my this was hard to install! I download the installer (WLInstaller.exe) and open it. It starts a webpage with my default browser (firefox, of course) and then tells me that I need to use IE 5.0 or greater. Well, damn. Do I really have to change my default browser just to install Windows Live Messenger? Come on now. I eventually track down another site that offers the install file directly.
  

I'll probably get around to installing Office at some point, and maybe AIM as well. But if I had to pay a few hundred bucks for Office, would I buy it? Probably not. We really are getting increasingly close to the idea of the dummy terminal.