Google Romance may have been an April Fool's joke, but online dating via Googlebase seems like an early-stage reality.
As a subset of People Profiles, this is interesting--but what's especially interesting are some of the small dating services loading profiles into the GB and the small but growing number of individuals posting themselves as date bait--basically, there's little cross-over between the explicitly sexual profiles posted on GB and the listings you see on most of the bigger online dating sites.
My friend Richard MacManus has a good piece on Google Base and all the formats they are now supporting--Michael Nguyen calls it Google Base Creep-
Of course GB will impact real estate, cars, jobs, before Personals, but the march is on.
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Susan: these aren't "individuals posting themselves as date bait" -- this is an adult matchmaking site, alt.com, spamming Google Base.
They're posting teasers to get folks to click through to their site, hoping they'll sign up as members, etc.
I hope Google figures a way to shut them down.
HotorNot.com has also seemingly put their entire DB in. I bet additional "legitimate" sites will follow suit. Porn always leads the way and always will. Google simply needs to add a "Safe Search" option to Google Base to protect kids and some adults.
"My latest favorite one person show is plentyoffish.com, which is a dating site. The service is very similar to other established competitorsexcept its completely free to use (other sites, like Match, charge a monthly fee). The sites sole owner and employee claims to generate ~$10,000/day from contextual ads.
Looks like plentyoffish.com has about 1/6th of the traffic that Match.com has."
http://www.aventureforth.com/2006/04/10/the-one-person-show/