Internet dating has taken a strange but perhaps more optimized twist. Today’s dating scene is tough - at least once you’ve gotten out of the target rich environment of college. A lot of people start developing relationships through email. But, some people are just good writers. What happens when the writing stops and the talking starts (not to mention old fashion “face time”).

There are “services” out there and every one of them describes themselves as ‘better than the rest’. But what about the technology *not* claiming to be a dating service … but sitting in a gray area ? I’m talking about social networking. These sites are being used for all sorts of things. Companies are investigating potential new hires. Scammers are trolling for targets. Predators are looking for victims. And less insidious, daters are looking for interesting people to meet.

Then there is the ‘other technologies’ - text messaging, bumper stickers with ‘membership’ ID numbers, profile matching algorithms, and the like. I would not be surprised if one day soon, Google promotes ‘the ultimate personal matching’ solution, leveraging their extensive database of personal tagged data.

Now let’s have a little fun with that idea ….

Consider for a moment you favorite search engine generates a personality profile based on your searches and pairs that with your on-line purchases. The add a dash of information from the blogs you read and top it off with some of those emails that arrived at your web-based email account.

Let’s see what happens to a hypothetical user named “Randy Jones”.

Over the past few years, Randy has been searching for baby toys. Randy also once searched for the history of baby names. Last month, Randy purchased a gift certificate from Victoria’s Secret and a Dremel toolset. Randy’s email include information about a trip to Foxy’s beach bar. The list of information goes on and on and including blogs about history of American presidents; book reviews of mystery novels; research on osteoporosis, glaucoma , breast cancer, and glucosamine; and a subscription to SoccerAmerica.

What do you think you know about Randy ? Is “Randy” a man or a woman ? Is Randy’s age in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, older ? Is Randy married ? Does Randy have/want kids/pets ? What hobbies does Randy have ? What else can you tell me about Randy ? What characteristics would you look for in a relationship match for Randy ?

Obviously, I’ve made some of the data vague to make a point. But the interesting fact is that when you have enough data to remove some of ambiguities - such as adding the following: “she”; “Bob and I had a great time sailing in BVI”; “niece’s birthday gift certificate”, “sister is pregnant again”; “summer reading list”; “aging parents”; “nephew’s soccer game”, and “anniversary cruise”.

Now you can answer a lot more of those questions.

“Profiling” *is* big business. The visuals in “Minority Report” (where citizens are bombarded with targeted advertising based on retinal scans may not be that far off. Just take Internet data gathering practices and match those to the facial recognition advances and you may just see those ads on busses and in airports change to target you as you pass by !

Was Orwell that far off ?!

Related tangests ...   Will Amazon S3 become the next consumer backup "product" ?   Trust your friends   Twitter is dead - at least for now for me

Posted in Facebook, Google, Personal Information, Privacy, Profiling, Social Software, Text Messaging |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.