Many of my friends are Internet and Soc Nw. Enthusiast . whenever we sit together ,we spend a lot of time discussing relative merit of every Sc.Nw site in market . some time back we were discussing most primitive form of all social Nw sites, namely DATING sites . Almost every one in group agreed to the fact that Online Dating is a BIG business but none of the company has got it right , specially in India . Most of the participant in discussion agreed that it doesn’t worked for them . adaptation , usage and throughput is not good enough.something is definitely broken somewhere . Our Culture and Conservative society is obviously a reason . but even in upwardly mobile Metro youth, usage of DATING site is not that much .
Some female members of the group were concerned about their Privacy and Fear of any possible abuse by stalker [SIKO is the term they use ] . they were convinced that most of these DATING portal is a fertile ground for abuse . that their security and reputations is at stake if they extend the conversation off line. so they may put up there profile on these site for the heck of it but response rate is very low . Most of them quoted the example of recent case of Mumbai teenager who was killed by his friends whom he meet at Orkut .
I don’t dismiss their fear ,its definitely not without some ground . but i somewhat disagree to the tendency to blame it on service provider .Possibility of stumbling upon some idiot is there but isn’t thats true for every place . Life in metro is a fertile ground for abuse . with thousands of Indian registered at Orkut we have only 2-3 cases of Orkut being used for some illegal activity . does that negate the whole concept ? Is it a case of BAD APPLE OR BAD BARREL ?
How can someone who want to do next orkut or some other dating service can address this concern of User community ,Investor ,Press and of course Moral Police ? Any thoughts ?
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@Alok
I posted my comment day before yesterday.Due to some technical snag it not getting displayed here. I tried to repost it but wordpress dont allow duplicates.I am just wondering if it is waiting for your approval.
IMHO, the best way for an India focussed site to become a dating portal is to NOT say you are a dating portal. In fact remove the word dating, casual encounters or whatever else from your site, and promote the concept of communication instead. Heck, a shaadi.com works better for dating!
For anything on the web today you have to find a way to handle the despo public. Of which there are a few gazillion.
IRC is (was?) a great place to meet people but the despos are there too in vast numbers. Some moderators had bots with IRC tools and weird names which were used against those that hassled the world. But the first question anyone would ask – and I was an avid IRCer for a while – was “a/s/l” – meaning age, sex, location. And my nick being Shenoy, the first three letters of which sounded feminine to the testosterone overdosed, I would get a ton of unprintable (well, printable, but not in decent society) messages until I used one of the aforementioned tools to disconnect their VSNL connection.
My point? That the amount of work that goes into “moderating” a channel (setting up bots, round the clock moderators etc.) is huge, and requires a very committed effort. at least in IRC the page can be scrolled away – in the web, all comments and pages stay there, for google to say hello.
The female members in your group are right. Its particularly bad here in India. A way to work on that might be to make it an invite-only-by-female-members group. Otherwise, trust me you’ll end up with 90:10 gender ratio which renders it useless.
Try building it around tags in del.icio.us or its copycats / derivatives. Those who share similar tags will get ranked in a higher order of probability (or in the closest degree of separation) where the webmaster can at least be sure that apples will meet apples, good or bad. No one can vouch for what happens outside the network.
Or the algorithm can alternatively figure out “the opposites”. Those who share tags that have least matches can be weeded out of one’s personal network. The fewer your tags match with others, it will signal uniqueness of interests that are being tagged by you – giving you a standout personality 🙂
Safety on internet networking sites certainly appears to be a two-way street. I do believe that users and service providers should share the responsibility in this regard. I would imagine that the majority of safety concerns stem from fraudulent representations – where people can claim to be something that they’re not.
The service provider could assume a three-fold responsibility. First, authenticate basic information like a user’s email address from each source (work, university and personal) by requiring users to click on a verification link sent to email addresses that bear a certain domain name. Verified pieces of information could bear a ‘verified’ seal on the user’s profile. Facebook does this well. Second, search results could be displayed as two sets for in-network and out-of-network, thereby clearly showing the user who the true ‘strangers’ are. Third, service providers could require a user to have a profile and have a minimum of 2-3 endorsements or references (by their friends) before they can start communicating on the website. These steps would act as deterrents to potential abusers.
At the same time, users on the website must assume a two-fold responsibility. First, be careful about who you add as a friend. At a minimum, a user should have talked to this person (either over email/phone or in person). Some sites like Facebook encourage users to go through the additional step of ‘How do you know this person’ to ensure this validity. Second, when contacting or accepting contact requests from other users on the site, users should only meet people who are in their ‘network’ – doing so ensures that there is a trail to this other person. If a user is unsure at any point, he/she should not hesitate to ask for references from someone in their network.
While the steps mentioned above are certainly not a recipe for success, they may get a little closer to helping make such networking sites safer.