Facebook not yet a mecca for singles to connect

In 2009 Sunil Nagaraj and two of his fellow Harvard graduates concocted an idea: They would use Facebook to launch an online dating service that could be quickly populated with the profiles single men and woman had already created for themselves.

The application, called Wings, could pull data from users' photo albums, Twitter feeds and FourSquare accounts to make matches and let friends set each other up.

But about a month ago, they stopped advertising the service.

"The trail of dating sites relying heavily on Facebook is littered with failures," Nagaraj said from the San Francisco office of his company, Triangulate.

In theory, Facebook should be a mecca for singles looking to connect. The site already contains pictures and relevant information on hobbies, occupation and location that romance-seeking men and women could use to determine their interest in an intriguing stranger. Moreover, it allows people to see their ties to friends-of-friends, adding a level of familiarity online dating sites can't offer.

In the past few years, dozens of services and applications have been built to capitalize on the opportunity. But as Nagaraj realized, most of them failed to consider one factor: Not everyone wants to broadcast to the world that they're single and looking for love.

"I wouldn't mind telling my five good friends that I'm dating, but I don't want my loose connections to know," Nagaraj said. And Facebook, unlike predecessors such as MySpace, has moved away from being a site where people cruise for dates by allowing users to shield their profiles from public view.

Nick O'Neill, founder of All Facebook, a Web site that watches trends on the network, said part of the problem is that online dating still carries something of a stigma. On closed sites such as Match.com and eHarmony, users are not required to use their full names and will encounter only other singles who have registered for the service.

Which is not to say O'Neill believes Facebook-based dating services are bound for the digital graveyard. Some of them, he thinks, will eventually become viable competitors to Match.com and the other industry giants. The companies leading the way, he said, use Facebook to attract users while maintaining their privacy.

Zoosk.com, for instance, lets people sign up for the service through Facebook and other networks. It imports their profile picture, plus basic data such as location and sex, but then moves users to a separate site that operates largely like a traditional online dating service. The company has attracted more than $40 million in venture capital and claims to have more than 50 million registered users.

AreYouInterested.com, an application owned by Snap Interactive, is adding more than 50,000 users a day, according to its founders, brothers Cliff and Darrell Lerner. The company started by offering a tool that allowed Facebook users to see which of their friends had secret crushes on them; only when both parties were interested would they be notified of the match.

Downloads of the application exploded when the service was expanded to allow users to search for other registered singles who fit the age, sex and location criteria they're looking for. Access to the full service costs $20 a month, but the company doesn't post anything to its customers' Facebook walls or news feeds that would inform others in their network that they're using the application.

As for Nagaraj, he hasn't abandoned the quest to develop a viable dating site. Next week, Triangulate will officially launch its new service, DateBuzz, which they hope will be more transparent and collegial than existing dating sites. They'll still use Facebook to market the service and gather customers' pictures and vital stats, but it will otherwise exist as a separate site that only registered users can access.

"The key lesson for us is that dating is a very serious thing," he said. "It's about maintaining control and privacy."