it a very good question and a very challenging one too.
if i were the owner of the site, i would require members to provide police checks, their income statement, their marital and immigration/citizenship status and finally references that could be checked out. also, the contact number of the imaam of their local masjid. i would also require them to provide names and addresses of 3 extended family and 3 friends…i’ll call and talk to them to make sure these people are genuine.
only upon verification of the info provided, the possible suitors will be able to see their rishta ads.
these stringent rules will have those pervs and insincere folks run away.
The point is that obviously the current models are not working for multiple reasons. You may think it is price, and i think it is not price but a sub standard product offering which does a poor job of weeding out tharkis and con artists. Plus how it shows who you may match with is ridiculously aunty level than what can be done today.
price is indeed a hurdle if you get this unverified BS, you dont know what a nick/screen name says is the truth. I would not pay for something like what they have out there right now if i was in the market.
I fully understand that people looking short term will not want to pay for signup fee or membership fee…but time is important, in elapsed time of ow long it takes to find the right person, and in touch-time as in how much time you spend on ppl you meet before you find the right one.
people can have screen names as much as they want, but the verification does two things, one it verifies that I am not pretending to be someone else..and also what I say about me is true. You dont have to see my name, employer etc, but just that X2 has a verified identity. you can choose to not include other stuff. as long as it is verified that the person behind X2 screen name is who he says he is, and is a real person.
The information is really not a whole lot more than what people have put on their linked in profiles anyway, and is not being made available to everyone…they can choose to share it once they are moving forward with a potential match.
It can be a freemium model, with premium features for people who want it, but I strongly believe that identity verification is key. If you find 20 potential matches and half of them are fraudulent, where do you start today and how much time elapses until you find out that a dude is full of crap, meanwhile what happens to the other real ppl? add opportunity cost to elapsed time and touch time as what a site that verified identities can do.
It definitely is not for everyone. I have not had the time to really assess market potential. Key issues being that in US there are screening services that can verify info, same in Canada, UK, and parts of Europe .. but for other parts of the world it becomes much tougher and a fairly labour intensive process from what I know so far. My view is simple, if the current mousetrap does not work…making it free will get more ppl to use it, does not mean it will do much trapping mice…not that shaadi is like trapping mice
If I were to set-up a match making matrimonial website - I would have very sophisticated profiling based on key personality traits - I would also ensure wali’s are registered not just for girls but for boys too … Wali’s must be married and be in a position of authority over the prospective partner seeker. This will eradicate a lot of nonsense … Parents/Guardians should be part of the selection process as much as possible … First the people complete their profiles, then the engine finds a match shortlist and then the walis have to make first contact … it will prevent direct contact.
Yes and it should be completely free - but the profile match will be good enough to shortlist 5 people based on a variety of things … Latest technology can be used to bring up face and feature recognition to optimise the types of faces a person may find attractive - (so part of the profile set-up will be to go through random images and score so the engine has an “idea” of the beauty of the beholder’s eye) and a strict passport face only policy for photos shall be applied - So no other bits. However, for other information about physique, etc will be including in the profile.
psyah- profile match is a fantastic idea.. both active direct control and passive activity analysis based
for me it is an approach like giving someone a list of traits and give everyone 100 points to spread across the traits.
then it is balanced with who you talk to, amazon like similar profiles feature, and then how you rate your experience or view of that profile..it becomes smarter as you use it more.
You just put the icing on the cake with cherries, bells and whistles … I think if a serious effort is put in to it by whoever it could revolutionise the matrimonials - because unlike the other sites that would make more sense for them to delay marriage it would make more sense for a free site to increase the chances …
Totally agree that passive and active profiling and snowball effect of engine intelligence will be perfect … Mind goes crazy
Github is an open-source development portal/forum - once the designs are complete one can always lift the developed product and install it into a godaddy site …
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