| 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. |