Dating sites for twitterers

I did a search for dating sites catering to the Twitter niche and found just three:

I did a google search and found these sites:

Site	Alexa.com rank
http://plentyoftweeps.com	1121827
http://flirt140.com	2100858
http://www.datetwit.com	3116521

Based on the poor Alexa rankings there is not much fire in these sites just yet. Advertising might still be ramped up, but in the mean time compare for example, my purely academic tree genus site which has an Alexa ranking of 1605781, and it is not advertised anywhere.
Any reasonably active site should have a rank lower than 100,000.
I guess love just doesn't fit into 140 characters!

Breakdown of Facebook Insights

Surprise, the city with the most fans of Brainiac Dating is Dublin, Ireland!
See the latest breakdown of the fan demographic from Facebook insights in the image below. The demographics are somewhat skewed by the relative efficiency of the advertising campaign we ran to get fans, because the actual BrainiacDating.com demographics are definitely more
biased towards US cities like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. We also have 60% male members and the age distribution is much less skewed towards to 18-24 year old end.


We could increase the number of Facebook "likes" - as it is now called, but my attention is instead focused on building a following on Twitter, and we just passed the 1000 follower mark without spending a dime. On the other hand, it cost a thousand dollars to get the 383 Facebook fans! You know where my attention is going...

New Twitter Scam

There are all sorts of Twitter scams, but I just noticed a new one. They pretend to be something interesting to get you to follow, and a while later they show a different identity. Otherwise I can't explain why I would have followed anything like this.



Twitter probably isn't the first place one would expect to find porn, but I suppose now it is also trying to figure out how to find itself using the new media. So I have to keep watching on who I am following to weed out the non-brainiac activity.
http://twitter.com/BrainiacDating

How to define "Brainiac"

I submitted a query on the HARO reporter to try and get a better handle on the term "brainiac", and how it may be better relate to my website BrainiacDating.com

Do you-think of a brainiac as someone like Bill Gates, or those characters on the TV show "The Big Bang Theory"? What about the painter Van Gogh, or the self-taught and well-read cab driver? Most intelligence theories involve many different kinds of intelligence, and still the term "brainiac" is relatively new, and it's not even in my spell checker. Best I can tell it originated from a monster in the superman comics, but has lately become a term associated smart geeks. Do you have other examples of brainiacs, or different ideas on how it can be defined?

There were four responses:

1. At first glance, was not "Brainiac" the name given to one of the first super computers quite a long time ago?
I may be mistaken but I have some kind of vague memory of such a thing.

2. I think the term "brainiac" should refer not just to the scientifically knowledgeable, but to the worldly curious. I think we all should try to be as curious about almost everything, as much as we can.

One of the best experiences you can give a child, a growing Brainiac, or brain, is to ask; "Do you have any questions?"
Their response is often, "Questions about what?" to which you reply; "Questions about anything..." Then when they show their curiousity or concern about something, you help them find the answer, so much easier now, more than ever, using the Internet. Then watch as their enthusiasm grows, they becom enlightened in front of you, and so, do you. We grow better by wonder and curiousity, and trying to find the answer. If you encourage it in others, or even yourslef, you become wiser and smarter, often happier.

Brainiac for me, seems to represent someone who holds a lot of knowledge. It seems rather cold and distant, like one of the first large computers.

However, the best stories of The Big Bang Theory involve not just the intelligence of the characters, the Brainiacs that they are, but even more importantly, their kindness and love for each other, encompassing their geekiness for what it is, and being glorious there.

Hawk

.......................................................................................................

Definitely the guys on "Big Bang Theory", Temperance Brennan from Bones, the math guys on NUMB3RS (Charlie and buddies). They are folks who are very analytical and consider even everyday decisions on the basis of numbers and science. Example 1: deciding what to order in a restaurant, they might consider the nutritional value (maybe calorie count) versus price of the item to get the optimal value. Or they might consider preparation time to select the item that will be ready the fastest (while including the time it will take to eat the item). Or they might do a probability table to decide which item has the least risk of contamination. How it tastes and what they like wont even come into the picture. Example 2: attempting some physical feat (jumping a ditch, shooting a basketball), the person will first consider distance, trajectory, wind, etc.

.......................................................................................................

I consider myself a brainiac for the following reasons.

1. I study brains! I'm a doctoral candidate at MIT, studying the neural correlates of reading.
2. I use the other side of my brain too :-) I write young adult fiction in my spare time.
3. And I bring the two sides together in a brainy package on my blog "A Brain Scientists Take on the Art of Writing." (http://blog.liviablackburne.com)

--
Livia (Liwei) King Blackburne
Graduate Student
Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT

.......................................................................................................

Brainiacs are people whose minds cannot shut off, no matter how much they try. In fact, their minds go at such at rate that its actually detrimental to the person's health. They are smart, in spite of themselves. Most brainiacs are attracted to hard subjects b/c they serve as types of distractions for their brain.

--
Sandra Ordonez
OurBlook.com

What do you think?

Zoosk is the fastest growing dating site!

In the past few months I've noticed that Zoosk has the most increase in traffic rank according to Alexa.com.
It is now in third place in the worldwide dating site traffic, and at the current pace it will become number one by the end of the year. Watch out match.com, you're next on their radar! However, I have a free zoosk account and though I do like the site layout it does have a huge problem with spam and fake profiles. I've had about twenty email contacts in the past six months, and every single one of them is likely spam. These are easy to identify by the cute pictures and fact that they are twenty years younger than me. That's just not real people, just someone trying to get me to send them cash via Western Union.

However, even with a large amount of spam on zoosk that I encounter, I am sure that they are actively trying to clean it up, and it probably does not affect their traffic rank significantly It can't be more than a few percent effect.


You can see my daily tracking of the top 25 sites here...
You can click on the site name and get a graph that tracks the daily activity. Note how Zoosk has a very linear gain
where the others seem to be more cyclic as would be expected when they run advertising campaigns.

Top Online Dating Sites on Twitter

I recently started tweeting about Brainiac Dating on Twitter, and wanted to see what the major online dating sites were doing... and the answer is not much! Seems like an excellent opportunity for a dating application... who's going to be first?

Site	Tweets	Followers
Match.com	1562	2470
Zoosk	1030	3506
OKCupid	998	2452
LavaLife	394	388
BrainiacDating	301	364
JDate	268	2535
Chemistry.com	265	1201
EHarmony	83	821
PlentyOfFish	48	548
DateHookup	12	1077
Mingle2	3	264

The big question is how to provide high quality tweets so that you get more followers? I have been giving the profiles of the day and interesting contributions from the members, and articles like this!

Making Contact in a Museum

This was sent to me by coach Tracey who organized a wonderful coaching event for my Brainiac singles group.

If you see someone you would like to meet, catch their eye and smile at them. The worst that will happen is they won't smile back and the best that will happen is that they will! If they smile back, approach them and say something positive about something uncontroversial in the environment. For example, you can talk to them about how delicious the food is, how beautiful the painting is, or how interesting the book is. Continue speaking about that subject until completion and then pick something else that is neutral that you can speak about in a positive way.

When it is time to leave, tell your exciting stranger that you very much enjoyed speaking with them and that you would love to continue talking about whatever it was that you were talking about. At this point the men can ask for the contact information. Give a big smile and walk away. That's it, master that and you've mastered the art of the introduction. Good luck!

Top dating related keywords

I did some analysis on keywordspy.com to figure out how much cost per click (CPC) advertising related to online dating was going for these days. These are the top dating related queries.

phrase	Click Cost	Volume/month	Top position in Google *
dating services	$9.36	832,000	eharmony
dating websites	$4.54	823,000	eharmony
free dating service	$3.07	135,000	SinglesNet
dating service	$2.92	1,000,000	ModelQualityIntroduction
dating sites	$2.51	1,830,000	eharmony
dating	$2.39	45,000,000	SelectiveSearch-Inc
singles dating	$2.38	450,000	Zoosk
internet dating	$2.44	450,000	eharmony

and for the Brainiac Dating keywords:

phrase	Click Cost	Volume/month	Top position in Google *
educated singles	$3.59	880	match.com
intelligent singles	$2.27	590	RightStuffDating.com
smart dating	$2.11	6,600	RightStuffDating.com
smart singles	$1.93	1,600	SeniorPeopleMeet.com
college dating	$1.82	33,000	eharmony.com
smart date	$1.76	6,600	match.com
intelligent date	$1.60	480	match.com
smart single	$1.52	18,400	match.com
college date	$1.00	49,500	meetlocals.com
university date	$0.66	165,000	match.com

* The top position in Google is just a snapshot, since it will change through the day.

Given that typical conversion rates are only about 10%, it means that for example, eharmony is paying over $50 to get each new member. I remember when a year ago, click prices were way lower, some have increased 1000%. That was when the economy was really on the rocks, but now advertisers are rolling along again.

Well, just how accurate is this? I'm not sure but it has given me some ideas to try ...

Find a date in a house of books

I would have thought that a library or bookstore would be an excellent place to find an intelligent date. Although I was way too shy for this in college, I definitely observed people hooking up in the library.

Check out the book related ads that I have used on Brainiac Dating:

There were some interesting comments about this in the BrainiacDating forums.
In general, it was not as positive as I would have thought, but I tried to find more data by posting the following query for news sources on a reporter website:

Have you ever found a date in a library or bookstore? Perhaps you met in the stacks looking for similar books, and ended up exchanging phone numbers. This seems like a good way to meet someone who is intelligent and shares similar interests, but are most bibliophiles too shy for this approach? Are some locations better than others, do you have a good strategy, pickup lines or experiences to share? Interesting responses will be posted to the blog on my website: Thanks.

Supposedly this query is read by up to 100,000 prospective sources, yet I only got one reply and that was from a woman who's parents met while they were working at a research library. Golly, surely there is more to library dating than this! Just the other day I was standing in my local Barnes and Nobles waiting for my girl friend, and a couple of different guys gave me the eye. Not that I wanted their attention, but at least I know that some people do try to hook up in these place of learning.

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