Copenda a People Search Engine for Love!
You’re not going to believe this one…
Copenda is a people search engine that allows people to search for new friends in social networks and dating web sites. Our algorithms crawl semi-structured data from social networks and dating sites such as Myspace, Bebo, Facebook, hi5, friendster, plentyoffish and more.
More people are using the web to meet new people and communicate with their friends. The main places people use to meet new friends or look for dating are social networks and online dating sites.
One of the major problems in meeting new people in social networks is that users need to scan and dive deeply into the profiles to initiate a connection for relationships or dating. Although many users use social networks for dating purposes, the social network user experience is not suited for this purpose. Online dating sites, on the other hand, are designed for this purpose but suffer from low status among the younger generation.
Currently, the only options to perform a cross-site profile search are limited to:
* Google regular text searches. Drawback: these are not suitable for people search, because users cannot filter the search results by gender, age, location, etc.
* Emerging white pages people searches. Drawback: the user must know the name or the email of the desired person in advance, which is not suitable for dating proposes or even when the user just wants to meet new friends with similar interests.
Copenda uniquely integrates an innovative user interface with dating site features such as personality search and social network features such as ranking, comments and tagging.
The new version includes many upgrades, some of them are unique:
* The graphic design was improved to emphasize that Copenda is a search engine - social people search engine.
* Contact me - One of our coolest and unique upcoming feature,the new “Contact me” feature will enable you to contact social networks profiles directly from Copenda without leaving Copenda.The massage will be sent via Copenda from your social network account. Any response from the user who got the massage will be delivered to your social network inbox.
* My Copenda - A personal area in copenda. user will be able to edit personal data, view and manage their favorite profiles,add their social network and dating profiles,invite friends and much more.
* Claim my profile - users will be able to manually add their social network profiles to our search engine and associate existing profiles with their Copenda profile. After claiming their profiles users will be able to manage them and get notifications when other users add comments to any of their profiles. You wont be able to test this feature unless your location is in the US.
* New filter option - Many of you asked us to add the ability to have search results only from your favorite social networks or dating sites. We added a new filter option which will enable you to have profiles in the search results only from your favorite social networks or dating sites.
* Cool people - a new area in the profile page which will show pictures of people in the same area
* Invite my friends - users will be able to invite their Friends to Copenda - the list of friends can entered manually ,
imported from their favourite web mail provider or imported from their favorite social network. Invitation will be sent via email or via their favourite social network.
* Public search API’s including mobile support (returning links tomobile version of the indexed sites).
So, I tried a search…
…and there she was - Natasha!
I just happen to live in Faber, VA so…
If she responds, I’ll update this post. We shall see. Thanks, Copenda! (Yes, I’m married)
Copenda, it’s more than just love - it’s a new way to find and meet people on the Internet.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:52 am
Charles,
Yes, “it’s a new way to find and meet people on the Internet.” But, is that good or bad? For me and many people like me, it is tantamount to an invasion of privacy. One of my lawyer friends avoids online dating altogether for this very reason, because his colleagues will enjoy the ridicule if they find him on the Internet.
Granted, not everybody avoids online dating and social networking because they place significant value upon personal privacy and safety. But, don’t you wonder how many people are reluctant because privacy and online dating/social networking are for the most part mutually exclusive?
Personally, I love the concept of “social dating” but with an important privacy twist. I would rather date people that were referred by those I know and trust. Why not leverage your social circle for romantic introductions?
There is a new site you should investigate called Sparkbliss (http://www.sparkbliss.com), which is pioneering what they call “private online dating.” Sparkbliss takes “six degrees of separation” and applies the idea to dating.
Did you know a recent Temple University study revealed “63% of married couples met through a network of friends?” Our loved ones instinctively want to help us find companionship. If it can help discover your soul mate, why not let friends and family play matchmaker?
Sparkbliss works like this: each member develops a private network of trusted friends and families who can view his/her profile and make romantic introductions on their behalf. As far as privacy, members have complete control over who they invite into their private networks.
Thank you for reading,
Joel (feel free to contact me)
May 16th, 2008 at 5:48 am
I wanted to response to the privacy thing, Joel mentioned:
Copenda’s crawler index the public data of public profiles so any private data is not indexed. Most of the social networks profiles are already indexed by search engine such as Google and Yahoo.
I don’t know how old are you Joel but the younger generation are different, they love reality shows , they want to expose their life anywhere, that’s why social networks and microbloging such as twitter are so popular.
And the last thing : Copenda is not just for dating…