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Startup idea: open source equivalent of an Internet dating site

4 points by joelthelion ↗ HN
I was looking for partners for a new open-source project, when it occurred to me that there is currently no good way to do this.

GitHub and friends are pretty great, but they only help when you have code to share. In my case, I had an idea that I wanted to discuss with other people before I started writing code. Also, I think it would be easier to find partners if they can have their say in the design, before half of the code is written.

More discussion on stack exchange: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/154022/how-do-you-find-partners-for-open-source-projects

4 comments

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seiji
Based on the title, I thought you meant an open source distributed dating service. That could be clever.
eshvk
Is Diaspora still around? If so, I figure that one could build one as a thin layer on top of that.

I think the harder problem in dating services is search/recommendations which would involve a good deal of custom ML to get good results for everyone. This in turn requires a huge time investment before it becomes good. All this would have to happen before the thing came out so as to make sure that early adopters don't get put off by the network.

seiji
I think if we have to ask "Is that thing still around?" it isn't a good candidate to build something on top of. Best to make something new that works.

With dating sites you have the two giant problems you mentioned: people in your DB and pair-wise matching. I think huge time investment is a bit of an overstatement -- you can go with simple okcupid quiz-like matching.

But, in aggregate, the masses don't care about "good" or even "works." Yahoo Personals? A ton of people where you sort by distance. I think most of the dating sites are entirely sort-by-distance with some optional search filters. People don't know how to judge website product quality, so they use whatever either their friends use or comes up in a google search result.

In short, http://www.google.com/trends/?q=yahoo+dating,+okcupid,+match...

eshvk
While what you say might be true for first time customers, I would think the complexity of IRL dating would transfer to the world of online dating. Meaning that most simplistic sort by distance type measures should fail once people actually start attempting to use the product for more than one date.