
Hacking the Hyperlinked Heart  - jseliger
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323374504578217973101313736.html?mod=ITP_review_0
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lesterbuck
This is a great story, and suggests lots of terrific ideas for gaming the
dating field. Where is the service that has collected and modeled a lot of
profiles from a given service, and then rates your profile for success? Or
rewrites your profile for you? There are certainly machine learning models on
the dating service side working "against" you to tantalize you but keep you in
the service for a longer period.

I have a friend who likes Latin women, reasonably good looking, speaks
flawless Spanish, and lived in Mexico and Spain for years. He discovered
Colombia a while ago, joined the premier online dating site, and started
collecting "favorites" all over the country. I wrote some scraping scripts to
capture all his favorites. He wrote a two line generic message "Coming to
Colombia <date>. Send me your cell and I'll call when I'm in town." I picked
out the Bogota women, for example, and did a "bulk IM" to his list. He
converted at about 20% from a cold IM into cell number in hand.

Another way to hack the system is run your own Adsense ads. A few years ago I
_accidentally_ got more than a thousand one cent clicks in Colombia from a
dating ad test. I was only testing how closely one can geo-target, and I
forgot to turn off my one cent bids and $1/day budget.

