DEMOfall09 - Gelato is online dating meets social search

Online dating is a somewhat static market. You have premium players Match.com and eHarmony, who seem to suggest at every commercial break that the person you've been looking for your whole life just signed up a few minutes ago. At the other end of the spectrum, there's Plenty of Fish which, although vastly improved from a few years ago, is still one of the least visually pleasing and user friendly sites on the web. PoF does ridiculous volume and traffic, is free, and doesn't do a stitch of marketing.

Enter new kid on the block, Ge.la.to. Launching today, Gelato takes online dating and mating to the social web. Incorporating your lifestream into the process of getting to know you, while paying a keen eye to keep privacy at a reasonable level.




Gelato uses your existing social web accounts in a couple of interesting ways. First, as a filter to weed out the creeps, married guys and anyone else who likely shouldn't be trolling a dating site for love, Gelato gives the power of validating your profile to those who know you on the web best, your social media friends. Gelato's "Social Confidence of Online Profile" score or "SCOOP" for short, assigns a rating to your profile based on how much validation Gelato has gotten that you're for reals. It's an interesting twist on the idea of building confidence through the social web. In real life, you take so many queues on whether or not you should trust new strangers from the environment -- Do they have friends? Are they well liked? Do they treat people well in public? -- and Gelato boils this down to the same kinds of inferences, only without the awkward noonday coffee date.

Second, Gelato integrates your social streams directly into your likes and dislikes. Steve Odom, founder puts it like this, "We call Gelato 'stream dating'. We use what your doing around the web - your Facebook profile, your tweets, Flickr photos, Netflix queue and more to quickly and easily build an online dating profile. Your profile is what you are actually doing, not some static, out-dated written profile."

So, instead of the books, music, movies and sundry that you happened to be thinking of when you filled out your profile, potential suitors can see that you're groovin' on the latest Yo La Tengo album, or that you like tweeting about TV shows. It's not a revolutionary step forward in the field of courting, but it does leave me wondering -- what took someone so long to do this right?

Gelato is free for new users, with a freemium model coming in the future that will open up a whole world of analytics about who's viewing your profile, and what other users are checking out.

Check out the video below, which shows just how easy it is to sign up and get started with Gelato.

Tags: DEMOfall09, lifestreaming, online dating, OnlineDating, social media, SocialMedia