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Comment by nyellin | Hacker News Reader

Online dating is a huge potential market.

Whichever service eventually "solves" online dating wont call itself a dating service. People don't use online dating because it is just that - online dating. The social stigma isn't going away.

Facebook can disrupt online dating by introducing you to Facebook users near you with common interests. Unfortunately, I am not convinced a startup can do the same, or I would be doing it.

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Would you want to expose people to your entire social world when you're still experimenting with whether or nor your even compatible with them? Dating experiments often go sour, or you might find out that someone is truly crazy. That's why we decided on a completely separate ecosystem that doesn't integrate with any other social platform. When things go bad, we think users would rather be able to quarantine the experience. In Date.fm, users can simply swipe and delete a match from their list, and it's removed on both sides. Neither can bother the other beyond that.

We totally agree about the online dating stigma, but we've got to be identifiable in some way.

Also friend of friends with similiar interests or letting the user match two of his/hers friends that he/she think might get along, etc. I quite surprised that they didn't get into that yet.

I'd be interested to see if the third party could be bothered matching two of their friends. It seems they'd have to go out of their way to use an app (on facebook) to do that.

That sort of stuff would be initiated in a conversation with a singleton.

I can only image they would. I often see people complaining that they don't have anything to do on facebook, what means that they get bored, they want more useless stuff to procrastinate.

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