Social network for night owls MingleNow appears to have been a victim of Yahoo’s recent acquisition of BlueLithium. According to a post on the service’s blog, MingleNow will officially close on January 7th. No official explanation has been made for the closure. We assume that Yahoo simply isn’t interested in maintaining another social network, especially since its purchase of BlueLithium was for its ad network, not its other holdings. See our early coverage of MingleNow here. The product is now in the deadpool. Via RWW → Read More
MingleNow is a place-centered social networking site that will offer real world incentives for online activity. Incubated by advertising company BlueLithium, MingleNow will launch a limited beta early next week and open to the public at the end of this month. I’ve been waiting for this to come to fruition for some time and I’ll be interested to see if it’s well received. If the real world events and incentives end up being something people are interested in participating in, then this could do well. I imagine that if top MySpace users, for example, told the world where they’d be on a Saturday night, a fair number of people would likely go there too. Unlike other social networks that are focused on people, MingleNow will be based primarily on locations like bars and other venues. Nearly 900,000 physical locations will have dedicated MingleNow pages at launch and users will be encouraged to upload photos and stories from those locations. Users will also have fully customizable profile pages. MingleNow emphasizes the viability of its service for events promoters. Users who bring in friends and populate the site with photos, stories and reviews will receive points towards real world discounts, early event notification and VIP access to select events. The service will kick off with public events at venues around the US this fall. Online/offline tie-ins are becoming increasingly common; from coupons from Google and Cellfire to Partystrands, social music recommendations in public venues. MingleNow will offer a personal calendar so people with various levels of permission see what a given user will be doing in the future, where and with whom. At launch the calendar will import and export to and from GCal and ICal; the company says they hope next to add syncing with Outlook. The company is partnering with a variety of third party services to provide functionality like mobile access and group SMS and voice messaging to co-ordinate events. The site’s search by tag and criteria for people and places works well. There is something about this that makes public events a little more sterile and packaged than I’d prefer if they are vetted by my personal profile and preferences prior to co-ordinating with friends, but in an increasingly on-demand world many people may want just that. The scores of venue pages on MySpace could certainly be far more functional and in MingleNow location pages will be. There → Read More
Online dating is big business, drawing about 4 million U.S. Internet users daily in June 2006 (and 25 million monthly), and they spend a daily average of nearly 17 minutes each on these sites. That adds up to a lot of page views – almost 4.5 billion per month (source: Comscore). And that doesn’t take into account the billion-a-day Myspace page views, which many people argue is basically a very large dating site. All told, at least 15% of U.S. Internet users visit an online dating site each month. The two largest dating sites are Yahoo Personals and Match.com, respectively, with a combined 9.3 million monthly visitors. Both allow free browsing, but to communicate with other members you must pay a fee. Match.com charges $30/month for the basic plan; Yahoo’s fee is $25/month. Both sites also offer premium plans that attempt to help you find a compatible mate. An entire batch of next generation dating sites have emerged that are starting to nip at the established players. One, PlentyofFish, launched in 2003 and has over half a million monthly U.S. visitors. Recently, even Google has entered the space through their Google Base product. One big difference is that these sites are (mostly) free, making revenue from ad sales alone. But many of these sites are also experimenting with new ways to introduce people who may be a good match. More on each below. → Read More
