Galaxy Spica Gets Android 2.1!
It’s too bad no carriers in the U.S. carry the Samsung I5700 Spica since there has just been a leak; thanks to Mad Ramblings Spica owners can install an Android 2.1 ROM! Some of the features of the ROM are the features we all want to see like the live wallpapers and Google Maps 4.0. Also included in the update is support for multiple accounts, exchange support, and an improved camera app. As always, we recommend you do an unofficial updating to your phone with caution seeing as how it will void your contract with your carrier and potentially lock up or brick your device. Anyhow, I am very excited about this leaked ROM as maybe it is the first of many to come. I know many readers were upset with the lack of live wallpapers for the DROID 2.1 update so maybe there will be a similar unofficial 2.1 updates that bring some extras to your favorite Android device. Let us know if you are successful and like I said before, head over to Mad Ramblings for the instructions on loading the ROM and a gallery of photos. [via IntoMobile , MadRamblings ]
Looking for a Date? A Site Suggests You Check the Data
Looking for love on an online dating service? Heidi Schumann for The New York Times Suzanne White Montiel of San Francisco says she likes OkCupid’s breezy tone. Related In the Calculations of Online Dating, Love Can Be Cruel (February 12, 2010) Michael Falco for The New York Times The founders of OkCupid are, from left, the mathematicians Max Krohn, Sam Yagan, Chris Coyne and Christian Rudder. If you’re a man, don’t smile in your profile picture, and don’t look into the camera. If you’re a woman, skip photos that focus on your physical assets and pick one that shows you vacationing in Brazil or strumming a guitar. Those are some of the insights that OkCupid, a free dating site based in New York, has gleaned by using statistical tools to analyze how the mating game plays out on its site. OkCupid publishes the entertaining and potentially useful results of its number-crunching on a blog that has recently turned into a big source of publicity for the company, pulling in new members. “We’re not psychologists,” said Sam Yagan, chief executive of the company. “We’re math guys.” Mr. Yagan and three other Harvard mathematicians founded OkCupid in 2004. In its fight against much bigger competitors like Match.com, PlentyOfFish and eHarmony, it has tried a number of marketing techniques, often with little success. But the blog, which OkCupid started in October, has helped get the company’s name out on other blogs and social networks. A post last month that set out to debunk conventional wisdom about profile pictures brought more than 750,000 visitors to the site and garnered 10,000 new member sign-ups, according to the company. For that analysis, the company catalogued the photos on more than 7,000 user profiles and looked at how many responses those users received from others. It found, among other things, that it didn’t matter whether people showed their faces, as long as the photos were intriguing enough to start a conversation. “If you want worthwhile messages in your in-box, the value of being conversation-worthy, as opposed to merely sexy, cannot be overstated,” wrote Christian Rudder, another OkCupid founder, in the post. Last fall Mr. Rudder looked at the first messages sent by users to would-be mates on the site, and which ones were most likely to get a response. His analysis found that messages with words like “fascinating” and “cool” had a better success rate than those with “beautiful” or “cutie.” “As we all know, people normally like compliments, but when they’re used as pick-up lines, before you’ve even met in person, they inevitably feel… ew,” he wrote. There are benefits to the company’s data-baring tactics. Since OkCupid started its blog, the number of active site members has grown by roughly 10 percent, to 1.1 million, according to the company. “We’ve been up for six years,” Mr. Yagan said. “We’ve only had the blog for six months. It’s a big deal for us.” OkCupid, which generates revenue from advertising and premium memberships, says it is profitable. The research firm comScore says the site had 735,000 unique visitors in January, up from 538,000 a year ago. Mr. Yagan said comScore was significantly undercounting the site’s traffic. The blog reports could help to build trust and add legitimacy to the site’s matchmaking approach, said Andy Beal, an online marketing expert and co-author of “Radically Transparent.” “There is an underlying psychological benefit to publishing statistics that resonate with your target audience,” Mr. Beal said. “People will start to think that this is a site where others like them are hanging out, and they should join it instead of one of its competitors.” To find matches, OkCupid members answer questions, most of which are generated and submitted by users, that range from pedestrian to risqué. The answers are weighted and analyzed by several sets of algorithms to calculate percentages of compatibility with other users. In contrast to the more opaque approach taken by most dating sites, a special area of OkCupid uses detailed graphs and charts to walk users through the matching process. “If we can be completely transparent and help demystify dating with data, maybe you will trust us to help find you a match,” Mr. Yagan said. Greg Waldorf, chief executive of eHarmony, which says it has more than 20 million registered users, was dismissive of the marketing power of OkCupid’s blog reports. 1 2 Next Page »
In the Calculations of Online Dating, Love Can Be Cruel
Heidi Funai sat perched at the swank bar at Circa in San Francisco’s Marina district, the city’s mecca for straight singles. As men sidled up, she noted which ones might be there to mingle and which wore wedding bands. This article is part of our expanded Bay Area coverage. The Bay Area Blog features coverage of public affairs, commerce, culture and lifestyles in the region. We invite your comments at bayarea@nytimes.com. Go to the Bay Area Blog » “The real world is a lot of work,” said Ms. Funai, an attractive 30-something with shoulder-length, wavy blond hair freed from her Vespa helmet. She had scootered into the real world to talk about the virtual realm of online dating. Ms. Funai once found love online, and now that she is back to search again, she has noticed a disheartening trend: it is getting increasingly cruel out there in cyberdating. “The social contract is broken with online dating” in a way that does not exist in real life, Ms. Funai said. She has used online dating sites for nearly a decade — and she does not like what she sees happening. Since the current recession began, the popularity of online dating has surged — memberships are up and new matchmaking portals have emerged to take advantage of the demand — industry growth of up to 30 percent is expected in the next year or two, according to the tracking site DatingService.com. This has also led to an increase in behavior that would earn a slap in person, but has become de rigueur on the Internet. Never-answered messages, explicit requests for sex, fake bios, outdated photos and insults are ubiquitous. Ms. Funai said men in their 50s had contacted her, completely unsolicited, just to say she was too old. “They wouldn’t do that in person,” she said, “but online …” It is love in the time of ones and zeros, the rudimentary language of computers. In the digital age, everything must at some point be reduced to this basic construct of choice: One or zero. Yes or no. On or off. Subscribers to online dating sites are forced to come up with a list of their desires. Red hair? Yes or no. Over 30 O.K.? Please check a box. The result is that millions are now trained to be dismissive based on detailed and sometimes arbitrary criteria. Combine this growth in fantasy checklists with the anonymity of the Web, and it gets ugly. Laurie Davis, an online dating analyst at eFlirtexpert.com has observed the problem — with men. “They forget about the chivalry factor sometimes when they date online,” Ms. Davis said. Who comes up with these measures? In most cases, it is the Web site’s owners. At OkCupid.com, however, it is left up to members to suggest dating criteria, and the result is an astonishing example of the need by some to quantify the ideal mate. Sam Yagan, OkCupid.com’s co-founder and a Stanford M.B.A. alumnus, said the site started with this premise: Can you use math and data analytics to match people up? With the goal of creating a screening process that was “more human than a checkbox,” Mr. Yagan said, the site takes thoughts from its 4.2 million monthly users to build the questions. Users answer as many as they like — the average is 233. With such a high number of expectations, no wonder some become disgruntled. And that might explain what is happening in the gay community and its rapid embrace of the iPhone application Grindr. When activated, a grid of dozens of tiny succinct profiles fills the phone screen, using GPS technology to tell users how far away they are from each another. “17 feet away,” the message said one evening when fired up at a cafe in the Castro district — a disproportionate number of men were then seen holding their phones and looking over their shoulders. Less than a year old and limited to gay men, Grindr already has 500,000 users. “We keep it PG-13,” said Joel Simkhai, the company’s founder. Although some use the application to facilitate casual hook-ups, no lewd language or photos are allowed. There is also the reality that users stand a good chance of actually seeing each other in person, not hiding anonymously behind a keyboard, enforcing accountability for one’s conduct. “It’s more consistent with real life,” Mr. Simkhai said, “a little less in your face.” A version for heterosexuals is in the works. But even this emerging slice of the online dating world is not immune from random acts of malice. Almost as soon as Grindr was created, a rogue Web site started called Guys I Blocked On Grindr, dedicated to publicly burning men considered undesirable. Perhaps there is no way to separate the more public forms of love and the more public forms of cruelty. Still, Ms. Funai will continue to try to navigate the minefield of online dating, although as a tech marketing manager, she knows that applying ones and zeroes to relationships is problematic. “What everyone is looking for is chemistry,” she said, “and that’s not quantifiable.” Scott James is an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in San Francisco.
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