MyGlobalCity

Verbdate + Skype: Online Dating Gets Audio VoIP Chatting July 10, 2006

Dating services have been predominantly around since the late 80s, when workaholism probably first started rearing its ugly head. First there were the match-making services, then introduction services via telephone - often advertised in the back of city weekly newspapers. Then came the online services. All of which cost heavily in terms of membership or intro fees. Then came Canadian Markus Frind’s site, Plenty of Fish, which is free but generates revenue to the tune of US$10,000/d by placing Google Adsense ads on the pages. Now there’s an even newer Canadian dating site, Verbdate, which takes the global village application thing one step further by not only incorporating Google Maps, and Flickr photosets, but adding Skype’s VoIP audio calling abilities.

Markus Frind got it right, making his Plenty of Fish dating site free. Several months back, a young friend admitted to using Frind’s website to meet women. But he also used several other dating sites simultaneously. After he touched base with a few women, he asked for and received their phone numbers. For several months, he spent many hundreds of dollars per month calling them from his cellphone, some as far away as the Middle East, from North America. (He, like myself, does not have a landline in his name. I haven’t had one since about 1997.)

I asked my friend why he spent so much on cell minutes, not to mention long distance calls across the world. While he admitted to using an IM client such as MSN Messenger to text chat, he didn’t seem all that familiar with VoIP clients such as Google Talk or Skype. (This was around Dec 2005.) He said that his process was to meet online through a site’s messaging feature, then exchange emails, and then phone numbers. Text chatting with IM wasn’t quite enough; he preferred using the phone for a deeper connection with someone. Hence the huge monthly bills.

He never gave me a satisfactory reason why he wasn’t using Skype or other VoIP IM clients, and I lost touch with him. So I don’t know whether he followed up and downloaded Skype and got his friends to do the same. My limited recent experience using both Skype and Sightspeed is that you can actually get away with justing a $1 microphone (yeah!), unless you have your RAM maxed out, and/or are also running a videocam.

But now with websites like Verbdate and the ability to actually VoIP talk with site members, it might be worth it for those lonely hearts to get a bit more RAM and a reasonable microphone. And if my young friend is any indication, there’s a lot of demand for dating services that offer VoIP audio, and maybe even video connections. Verbdate is probably betting on this demand.

Are you wondering how long it’ll be before someone uses Skype-killer Sightspeed’s free WoIP voice and video calling service to build an online video dating service? Me too. So I called up the friendly Sightspeed support guy via Sightspeed and had a WoIP (voice and video over IP) call with him. It seems that they do have an SDK (Software Development Kit) and he thinks that a video version of an online dating site like Verbdate could be built.

Got an urge to do something like that? Send in a proposal to Sightspeed. Contact info is on their contact page.

For a bit more indepth look at Verbdate, check out VoIP Now’s VoIP Dating Becomes Reality.