Welcome to the Dating Syndicate!

Today's Personals

Hi...I'm a very attractive union actor living with girlfriend seeking a very secret and discreet relationship with someone in the entertainment industry who can help me (producers, directors, casting people, agents, celebrities, etc..). I'm 27, 6', 180 lbs, brown hair & eyes, thin neatly trimmed goatee, smooth skin & chest, very nice face/smile, confident kind outgoing personality, kissable lips, open minded, can be a top or bottom depending on who I'm having sex with, disease free. Honest sincere replies only!!!!!

Posted by filchyboy
Tuesday, October 17, 2000. 11:35 PM


Eeek, I got a response!

Filchyboy,

You're just the kind of scumbag I've been looking for to put in my new film. God, you sound perfect. Give my people a call, and please, please, please, DO NOT somehow find or develop a sense of decency in the meantime. It would positively ruin the whorish, unctuous quality that I desperately need for my film and you no doubt possess in spades.

Cheers, Thomas

The Dating Syndicate is an aggregation of techniques and tools to manage your own personal ad. You might call it a dating service for bloggers.

On the web there are many dating sites such as Match.com, SpringStreet, PlanetOut Personals, Flirt, Yahoo! Personals, Udate, eHarmony, Hot or Not, and many many others. The industry in 2002 was estimated to be worth some $917 million. You can read a U.S. Dating Services report from MarketResearch or the U.S. Dating Services report from MarketData Enteprises for some indications of the size of the market and major demographic considerations.

I have tried a few personal ads and although I haven't gotten many quality dates out of them I find them to be singularly fascinating as a form of human expression.

But aside from that personal ads seem to be a cash cow. I know that the fellow who owns (or owned) adultfriendfinder is making quite a bit of cash out of the thing. And this whole infrastructure, no matter who the vendor is, depends on the user relying upon the vendor to be the point of contact between the two parties. If you can bypass the vendor and simply begin communicating through some other channel you cut out the revenue stream for the personals site. This is why if you put an email address or a web address on a personal ad the vendor will remove it.

What if you could place a personal ad and find your soul mate (or hook up for a party) without paying a monthly fee?

Sounds interesting. Tell me more.

The Dating Syndicate is envisioned as an open framework for distributed personal ads. It will be built under a Creative Commons license. It will employ the same ping and response system which is used so effectively for tools such as weblogs.com, technorati, & blogshares. The Dating Syndicate will have 2 modes, open face or closed, to ensure each user is able to maintain the exact level of privacy they desire. Interfaces for browsing the personal ads will be managed through CSS files which will be available system wide or user chosen. The level of granularity with questions and topics will be as fine or as rough as each user decides with the capability for user designed "question templates" which can be shared within sub communities. For example you could have a set of preference questions which fit the folks who frequent Suicide Girls. Dating Syndicate files will be based on the FOAF format and the production of these files will be available either through a central service or as plugins or tools in all the major blog software such as Movable Type or Radio. And of course the beauty of the FOAF format is that you can simply roll your own if you like. Dating Syndicate ads will be dynamic, responsive, and loaded with additional information about connections, trends, traffic, popularity, etc.

There's much more tied up in such an idea. This channel will be used to discuss the various pieces of such a design and to begin implementation. I expect there is lots to come. Interestingly enough I have no idea of anyone would be interested in even using what i have envisioned but it strikes me as an interesting puzzle to work out. And I do so love puzzles.

Up next I'm going to break down what FOAF files are and just how they might be used to build a distributed personal ads system.

Posted by filchyboy at November 23, 2003 08:23 PM | TrackBack