@Vooji
There are two things that deserve to be reconsidered at Drive By Dating – an Australian automotive dating site.
UPDATE: This could be very, very clever marketing indeed. Those Aussies…
If you’ve written mail to my vooji.com email address and had it bounce back sorry. As of right now, that address is working and I’d still love to hear from you. Technology is hard sometimes…
Some people are having problems recording profiles with Vooji. I do not want this to happen, here’s how to fix it.
When you click to record your profile you’ll see this Flash pop-up.
Don’t panic. Click ‘Allow’ and you should see your webcam image and a flickering line of red bulbs whenever you make a noise. If so great, everything’s fine, if not put your mouse over the gray video box and right-click. You’ll see a menu, select the “Settings…” option and you’ll see something like this:
Choose the webcam tab (shown above) if it’s not selected already. You now need to select your webcam from the menu. If you have a Mac, like me, you might have a few. Your iSight cam is called “USB Video Class Video” for some reason only Adobe understands. Choose that and you’re webcam tab will look like this:
Now all you need to do is click close and you should see your pretty mug and be ready to record. If you don’t have a Mac, or this doesn’t work, repeat the steps and select each of the cams in your list in turn until one starts working. Remember to close the Flash pop-up, your changes won’t have any effect until you do.
Great – I look forward to seeing your profile, and all your potential dates do too (next week!)
Still having problems? Let me know.
Sam.
Vooji’s a work in progress and we’re always working on rolling out improvements and tweaks. A couple of people have said:
“I love the design but I think other people might not.”
Does anyone who doesn’t like the design care to tell me more about why? Anyone who loves it keen to do the same? I’m listening.
Thanks to your feedback we’re already working on ways of making recording a Vooji profile easier. Until those changes are in place I’ll tell you that the ‘Photo’ button, which looks like a Polaroid, allows you to shoot a new photo to go along with your profile. Be default we choose an image from halfway through your profile. If you don’t like the automatic selection just click ‘Photo’ and take another.
Not recorded a profile yet? What are you waiting for…?
You can now record a Vooji profile in advance of the beta opening. This is a good idea because:
The profile set-up form is here. It takes less than 2 minutes, try it on for size.
The Times has a piece about self deprecation which has interesting implications for online dating.
It suggests that self-depreciating comments are attractive when they’re obviously untrue. I.e. If you say “I must look terrible”, when you don’t, you’re drawing attention to your good looks and that makes you seem more attractive.
Online it’s hard to know someone’s attractive (this doesn’t apply to Vooji which is based around video profiles) so self-depreciation won’t work in a positive way unless you can clearly show that self-depreciating comments are act of humility, not statements of fact.
The challenge then becomes finding something to show off about which you can deride. That’s pretty much the English national character. No wonder I used to do so well online…
I met my wife on Craigslist. It was an accident as I was doing research on launching a dating site and couldn’t resist her ad. I wasn’t supposed to write back to anyone. The research consisted of placing bogus profiles, for both men and women, to see what worked best. When people responded I’d explain the project and ask them why they wrote back. Many of them swore at me or threatened some sort of fantasy legal action. The others taught me the following:
1. Post a decent photo
I know your mother told you that looks aren’t important but she was lying because she loved you. A man’s photo should be clear, shirt-on, not taken in front of a mirror and not an actors headshot.
If you can post more than one photo it’s even better. You’ll seem more real, and can prove you were not only halfway goodlooking for 1/50th of a second in 2007. Don’t crop out any exes, or scribble over their eyes in ballpoint, it’s code for “I live in crazytown”.
If you’re a man, any women seen in a photo with you will be assumed by some to be your partner. The more ridiculous that seems to you, the worse it’ll look to the people you want to date. Same thing for kids, people will assume they’re yours and, even if they are, why are they in your personal ad?
Women have to account for men’s visual bias. If you post a photo of a sunset, bunny or other cuteness men will assume you’re too hideous to be seen. If you post a photo which is a minute crop of a much larger image we’ll assume you’ve edited out the 400lbs of you which make you ‘cuddly’. If you post photos where the camera appears to be about to go spelunking in your cleavage we’ll assume you want us to look. Being wary of posting photos online was sort-of reasonable in 1999 but in the age of Facebook it’s ridiculous. You’ve nothing to loose, no-one’s going to write back just to insult you.
Beautiful women have another problem. Spammers long ago worked out that a gorgeous woman on a dating site would draw thousands of responses and thus beauty became associated with spam. Now real models, actresses and gorgeous people have to work on appearing genuine, luckily it’s not hard. Avoid posting professionally taken photos, or couple them with candids. If you look to good to be true you’ll be treated as such. Make sure your photos aren’t suspiciously cute. Spammers use sex-appeal to sell so include something less flattering just because a spammer never would. Don’t worry about not looking your best, you’re gorgeous remember?
2. Learn HTML
Craigslist has a crappy ad upload form. If you don’t break your paragraphs up with code everything you write will appear as a single, huge, block of text. Start every paragraph with <p> and end it with </p>. You’ll then join the elite 5% of posters who don’t share a writing style with the unabomber.
3. Write more than one paragraph
90% of spam posts on Craigslist have a single image and a single 3 or 4 line paragraph. If you avoid this pattern you’re less likely to be ignored for being a robot.
It’s also worth avoiding the OWEN MEANY STYLE BELOVED BY PEOPLE WHO FORWARD RELIGIOUS EMAILS. Also feel free to go easy on the poetry. Most good poetry’s hard work, yours is likely to be… just don’t.
4. Show don’t tell
Many personals read like lists of specifications but marketers know you don’t by a product for what it is, you buy it for what it does.
Apple don’t publish frequency response charts for the iPod because it’s not important. They tell you how it’ll make your life better and more fun. Personal ads are the same. Who you are, what makes you tick, and why you’re fun to be involved with are far more important than your height, weight and eye-color. (Do you really want to be involved with someone who chooses their partners based on eye-color?)
Write about the things you offer instead of the things you want and don’t waste any time talking about the kind of people you don’t want to hear from. If you get unwanted responses you can ignore them but, to exclude people arbitarily in the beginning will make you look angry and fragile. It’s more fun to choose from the responses you get than to wonder why you’re not getting any responses.
5. Don’t post too often
A lot of people spend a lot of time cruising the personals. If you search for specific phrases, or visit regularly, it can be easy to skim through 3-4 days worth of posts in a single session. If you post too often potential dates will notice and file you away as desperate. Posting once a week is good. Posting once every two weeks is better. If you follow the rest of this advice you won’t be short of options.
Any other tips? I’m always interested?
This blog will dissapear for a couple of hours in the next 24 as we rejig things so we can launch our site. Exciting stuff. Sorry for any inconvienience caused.
Mark Andrew responded to personal ads and invited the posters to sit for him. The photos, along with the personals, are now online.
What’s interesting to me is how much more you learn about someone from a good photo. In fact, you can probably tell most of what you need to know about a potential date based on the photo alone. I guess they really are worth a thousand words.