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ProfileApproval: Automated Propriety Policing for Online Dating Sites

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"Charlene" is a 26 year old "goofy goddess" with a terrific body and 2 Siamese kittens. Her user profile is well-formed, complete, and as far as her favorite dating site, CaliDate.com* is concerned, completely legitimate. However, Charlene's profile is a counterfeit.

George is a 28 year old office manager who lives alone in a modest apartment in Santa Clara, CA. Since breaking up with his long term girlfriend, 9 months ago, he hasn't been on a single date. The movie Office Space is his best friend. He feels pathetic. Tonight, George resolves to change all that. He sets down a half-eaten slice of pizza, opens IE7, and logs onto CaliDates.com.

Two houses away, unbeknownst to George and the owners of CaliDates.com, a guy named Mike is just going to work. Tonight, Mike has three objectives:

  1. Scour the Internet for pornographic photos and videos that can be easily and "safely" stolen and;
  2. Create 5 or more bogus user accounts on CaliDates.com.
  3. Make a few bucks from a few lonely suckers on CaliDates.com.

Like a skilled novelist with years of practice, Mike weaves 4 new and seemingly genuine user profiles into what he calls a "smokescreen" of deception. Each of these 4 users have minor flaws, which Mike knows from experience will attract the interest and ire of CaliDate.com's operators, thereby distracting them from attending to his money maker: Charlene Betz.

Mike is bad for CaliDate's business. Bad bad bad. Sometimes they detect and delete his "money makers". Most times they do not. They have often considered investing in a more robust and reliable profile scrubbing software solution but the reality is that they have to walk a tightrope between developing ever smarter and more agressive scrubbers and alienating new and paying customers by deleting their legitimate profiles inadvertently.

All (or most) of the dating sites on the Internet have teams of what I call "Propriety Police", people who get paid to evaluate suspicious new user profiles and perform ad hoc reviews of a certain percentage of existing ones. A few of these sites employ pattern recognition software that promises to completely automate the identification of questionable content and counterfeit user profiles, like Charlene Betz, "within a few years."

Today, Dave Evans over at Corante.com alerted me to the recent announcement of a new business service for social networking sites.

" ProfileApproval  [is] an innovative business service for social and internet dating websites, was today launched by Irish software house, WebSpirit. ProfieApproval.com offers social websites the opportunity to ‘clean up’ photographic and text profiles posted on their sites."

Interesting Web 2.0 business model...

*Note: Calidate.com is a fictitious website. I didn't want to use a real one.

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