online dating

eHarmony is a great site. Though i have a wife i always search for right girl there. LOL…..

The questionnaire gave me new insight into what I needed in order to prosper in a long term relationship. The “other” dating sites allow you to browse through different profiles, but you are subject to your conscience desires, and not driven by your subconscious needs. You may go for a person who is very attractive, but does not have the deep-seated personality traits that make for a long lasting relationship.

My vote is for eHarmony all the way. I don't know if they have divorce statistics yet, but I would bet my savings that the rate is much lower than the alternative means of meeting your true love.

I think that I tend to appreciate the Craigslist approach over eHarmony and I agree with you that standardized questions tend to elicit standardized answers. In thinking about it, I would imagine the time that goes into determining the questions and then how to categorize people based on those answers would be quite intensive. While I think some level of categorizing based on standardized questions may be useful, I'd like to see something that adapts based on a more long-term interaction that isn't quite so black and white.

The most part of a profile however, should be dynamic. It should pull in all the actions that the user performs on the corporate systems, i.e. tagging, commenting, bookmarking, favouring, rating, adding information to the CRM, checking in a document into the DMS, making changes on the wiki etc. These actions truly reflect what a person is about, rather than relying on the words that a person uses to describe himself.

Experience shows that people can't be bothered filling in their profile data and even less to keep it up to date. That's why I can't imagine people answering a large number of questions unless it is mandatory. But even then, the role and work of people change. Do they then have to answer those questions again?

I would be very interested to know who the BETA company testers are. I assume you are not allowed to disclose that information, are you?

My company recently did an internal network analysis to evaluate the quantity and quality of linkages between employees and we're now looking at the results for trends (e.g. people in knowledge communities tend to network more with other people in communities and we still have a lot of geographic and organizational walls). Next we'll need to come up with some action items to improve the picture. I think one action has to do with giving people more ways to connect using technology since we are so globally dispersed. But I believe that's a big cultural change and a very up-hill battle.

Very interesting discussion. There are a few things we at Personal Pathways would like to contribute to the conversation.

In actual practice our profile is somewhere in between CL and eHarmony (we agree with several of the comments that a combination of the two is actually the preferred approach). In contrast to eHarmony, we do not require users to fill out every portion of the profile but rather allow them to fill out as much as they would like when they would like and in the form they would like. In contrast to Craigslist, we do provide more structure to the information in the profile to both 1) help users who are not comfortable starting with a blank text box present information about themselves and 2) solicit information in a form that the system can more readily identify connections among individuals. By combining these approaches, a variety of insights about individuals can be achieved.

Ideally, insights about a person reveal a variety of non-random dimensions to them – dimensions of life and work that matter to another person and can affect the chemistry and effectiveness of a relationship. Therefore, the challenge is to reveal glimpses of a person of a nature and substance that increase the probability of triggering other people or another person to think about them differently than they would have absent this information. Research and experience support the idea that the level of trust and confidence that underlies collaboration that achieves differentiated results depends on knowing one another beyond a superficial level. While that non-superficial level might be gained by either the CL or eHarmony approach, Personal Pathways' approach helps surface meaningful insights about colleagues of sufficient variety to support the most effective collaboration.

We appreciate the framing of the question from you and the comments thus far. We also look forward to more discussion on this topic moving forward and seeing how this topic plays out in the enterprise.