[kristenlee]

The facebook thing is an absolute dealbreaker, what don't engineers understand about people not wanting to use facebook for everything? So annoying. If you want people to use real identities there are plenty of other ways to go about it, furthermore it is not that difficult to create a fake facebook profile, i have three myself.

[jfarmer]

Are you kidding? Engineers are one of the most privacy-conscious demos out there, especially under 30.

Just read any post on HN about any site that uses Facebook Connect. Half the comments will be about how they refuse to so much as look at that button.

I disagree that going full-on-public is the right approach.

For women, especially, they get bombarded with all kinds of creepiness. I think it'd be hard to get people to waive their right to hand out information at the pace they feel comfortable.

Anything that alienates women from a dating site is a deal-breaker, IMO. The dating sites that do well are the ones that can attract and retain female users.

That said, there's a kernel of an interesting idea here. The process of dating is revealing increasingly intimate details about ones life. If you reach a point where it feels uncomfortable, you break up.

For the "online" portion of online dating, e.g., sending messages back and forth on OKC, this is very explicit. Guy sends girl a message. Girl responds. Guy reveals name. Girl reveals name. etc. Until eventually contact information is exchanged, and then you arrange an offline date.

So the "core" problem of online dating is one of building comfort.

One Facebook-powered feature that could build comfort might be to show how many friends you have in common (but not who). Another might be to show where your Facebook likes intersect.

But forcing people to reveal all their information immediately really runs against the grain of the whole idea of dating.

[krausejj]

regarding "forcing people to reveal all their information immediately really runs against the grain of the whole idea of dating" -- in most cases, the public Facebook profile is hardly "all my information," and sites like OKCupid that do online dating the "traditional" way are already out there. this is an alternative - for people who want to try going against the grain.

[jfarmer]

I'm not saying it's against the grain of today's dating sites. I'm saying it's against the grain of dating, per se.

[jamesaguilar]

To me, it seems like this question should more often be posed in its inverse. Most people don't have a problem with using Facebook for everything. In my experience, at least, it's engineers who are most likely to have a problem with using Facebook for any given task.

[jfarmer]

That's also my experience. Also, the older the person the less likely they are to want to connect with Facebook.

But non-technical people under 30? No problemo.

[biot]

Normally I'd 100% agree. However, in this case the use of Facebook is what offers the benefits. Want to filter out all your friends so that they cannot see your dating profile? How do you do that on a normal dating site? Even if you could preemptively block your friends by username, your friends might be in the same boat where they don't want you knowing their username.

If you aren't interested in those benefits, I would argue you're essentially not interested in the site and should use any of the myriad other sites.