If there is one activity that sums up both where we are with technology as a society but also the convergence of mobile, the Web and online business in general, it has to be online dating.
Never had to try it? Then you are probably in the very lucky minority of marriages or civil partnerships that last the distance – or genuinely think having a Megan Fox screensaver is the same thing as having a girlfriend. Indeed, according to someone who should know, Ross Williams, CEO of what’s claimed to be the largest privately-held online dating firm in Europe, Global Personals in Windsor, searching for a partner in cyberspace is now "the default way of meeting people".
As proof points – at least for his business – his company’s sites get six million visitors a day and last month there were no less than 85 million unique page views. His company is Rackspace UK’s biggest database company, no less. "We’re talking huge volumes of traffic," he told CBR. And in fact, as we’ll see in a moment, running this kind of purely online business makes his company in effect a technology company in anything other than name.
At the same time, there are some huge social issues going on here that while aware of, suppliers like Williams obviously feel is not exactly their problem. One can ask surely how healthy it is for us to be approach Love like it was a case of buying the best car insurance product we can find – a sort of Moneysupermarket.com for finding your better half. Or, er halves, as obviously not all Web dating is about finding The One – Williams’ company’s platform supports some 4,000 individually branded sites as he runs a white label service, and some of those (as we should be happy with in a free society) are somewhat exotic, shall we say.
Some of these issues are explored critically in a documentary just shown on BBC2 Scotland that your correspondent was a talking head in, in fact – ‘Wink, Meet, Delete’ being the title independent Scottish film-maker Sue Bourne chose to sum up her exploration of this world.
There are not just philosophical/sociological issues around Internet dating in the abstract. Users of Internet dating sites sometimes complain there are huge problems with fake profiles and scammers, not to mention the fact that the attractive pictures one sees on New Promising Site X are often the same as the ones one saw on Didn’t Work For Me Site Y that one’s just left as bored or discouraged.
Williams says there are issues in the industry but that his firm takes great pains to avoid them. "Some dating sites outsource too much and have moderation teams in different parts of the world and so on so they don’t take enough care to validate responses and check that each profile or first message is from a genuine person and has the content it should be," he says. "There are some unethical practices out there that do need stamping out. But for us, customer service is paramount so we take care to try and prevent this as much as possible."
There may be more work to do here, as Williams says the next explosion is the meeting of mobile and Internet, which he says opens "fantastic opportunities" for dating on the move. We’re talking about a world that some people are already in where there is no boundary between on and off-line in effect.
Making that work takes technology. When he started in 2003, Williams – himself a former IT professional – led the building of a platform based on Adobe Cold Fusion, Macromedia and the MySQL database. That’s constantly grown and been updated so that now his operation runs on a combination of Apache at the front end, MySQL still but now distributed and using redundant master/slave configuration, plus technologies likes Sphinx and Ruby On Rails (on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in case you were wondering — see more at http://globaldev.co.uk/).
So what we have here is a great UK technology company growing and doing well, plainly. Williams also stresses that the last thing he’d do is outsource his technologists, either; he says the fact that they can have coffee in the same kitchen as his customer service or business development people is a huge bonus for the company in terms of innovation and dealing with problems.
But it is nonetheless a business area that some people feel uncomfortable about. Judge for yourself how you feel after reading his observation that, "For less than Starbucks costs a day for a coffee you can go online and meet as many people as you want."
Boy meets girl? As dead as client/server, it seems.
