Mr. Dell (Photo: Wikipedia)

Dell's board of directors were said to vote last night on a $23 billion deal to take the company private, with private equity firm Silver Lake Management, Microsoft and company founder Michael Dell among the key players. [AllThingsD]

Competition between on-demand taxi service startups continues to simmer. Later this month, New York City will launch its pilot program for e-hailing yellow cabs. Meanwhile, Uber competitor Hailo is launching a subsidiary in Tokyo. [TechCrunch]

Nearly half of single women research prospective dates on Facebook before they meet, according to Match.com. Also in the survey, promiscuous sexters! Thirty-two percent of singles have sent a sext, while 51 percent of singles have received a sext, which by our math means some of you are sending more than your fair share.   [Mashable]

A group of Florida investors is hosting something called the "pitch house" at the Startup Conference next week. Sounds like a pilot. [Nibletz]

Benchmark Capital's Bill Gurley, Chamath Palihapitiya of Social + Capital Partnership and SurveyMonkey's Dave Goldberg talked Venture Capital and IPOs.  [Bloomberg Television]

Twitter is hiring engineers to beef up security after a recent hacking attempt. [Wired]

(Photo: Weblo)

A woman in Las Vegas has filed a lawsuit against online dating service Match.com after a man she had gone on a date with through the service brutally attacked her in 2010. Mary Kay Beckman is seeking $10 million in damages after her match, Wade Ridley, hid in her garage and then stabbed her ten times before kicking her in the head. Ms. Beckman has had to have several corrective surgeries following the attack.

Soon after assaulting her, Mr. Ridley was accused of murdering another woman. He was being held as a murder suspect before he committed suicide in jail.

Like other online dating sites, Match.com does not do crimininal background checks on its users, although it does check members agains the sexual offender registry. However, Mr. Ridley did not have a criminal record at the time he was on the service.

The lawsuit hinges on the argument that online dating is inherently unsafe, and that Match.com should come with a warning label notifying users of the potential dangers of meeting strangers online. Ms. Beckman is asking for a disclaimer to be appended to the site. Match.com says it already provides tips for safe online dating on its website.

“The basis of the lawsuit is the advertising that is utilized by Match.com, lulling women and men into a false sense of security,” Ms. Beckman's attorney, Marc Saggese. told KLAS-TV. Match.com is “absolutely not safe," he added.

The suit raises some pointed questions about the legal protections of websites and just how culpable they are for the actions of their members. Suddenly sweetheart scams seem so innocuous.

We've reached out to Match.com for a statement and will update when we hear back.

Update:

Match.com provided Betabeat with the following statement:

"What happened to Mary Kay Beckman is horrible, but this lawsuit is absurd. The many millions of people who have found love onMatch.com and other online dating sites know how fulfilling it is. And while that doesn't make what happened in this case any less awful, this is about a sick, twisted individual with no prior criminal record, not an entire community of men and women looking to meet each other."

Pictures included in the 2,000 online dating profiles Betabeat purchased for $70.

Angela is a 34-year-old single woman from Alabama. She’s a Leo. According to her online dating profile, she is 5’8” with blue eyes and dark brown hair. “I am a creative, witty, intelligent girl looking for someone to shower with all my love and affection!” she declares, appending a smiley face.

Angela was included in a 1,000-pack of allegedly single, supposedly American women, which Betabeat purchased for $35. Her profile is one of a purported 14.9 million for sale on SaleDatingProfiles.com, where the inventory also includes 10,000 U.K. profiles for $200; 15,000 Russians for $240, and 70,000 Australians for $95. A pack of 2,500 lesbian profiles goes for $120, or 4.8 cents apiece; gay men are .003 cents each and are sold in a pack of 410,000. “High quality Gays adult dating profiles for sale with multiplay photos located in USA, United Kingdom, Canada and other countries,” the offer states. At the time of writing, SaleDatingProfiles was having a 75-percent-off spring sale.

Angela, who asked that her last name be withheld, has been dating online for years. But she never imagined her profile was for sale on the open market, or that it now appears on MeetGirlsGuys.com, which she never signed up for. “I have never even heard of that site!” she said, adding that she lives in Texas, not Alabama, and the photo is at least seven years old.

Online dating is a fast-growing industry, with current revenues estimated to run between $1.5 and $3 billion a year. But every new dating site faces the same problem: finding souls to mate. Recruiting new customers is expensive; industry experts put the customer acquisition price at $1 to $5 per person.

SaleDatingProfiles and its competitors BuyProfiles.com and DatingProfilesSale.com offer a shortcut. They sell bulk packages of profiles that seem to include a fair number of actual singles alongside somewhat more questionable Russian beauties, Nigerian bankers and half-empty profiles, which sometimes sell for less than a dime a dozen.

Betabeat emailed 208 men and women whose profiles are being sold on SaleDatingProfiles. Most didn’t reply; 35 emails bounced. Only five people responded, none of whom knew their profiles were for sale. Harry Lin, a 61-year-old in Switzerland, noticed that a profile he started at Jumpdates.com had somehow made its way to Mega Dating and the now-defunct Sensual-Attraction.com. “They have my email, user name, birthday and *former* Jumpdates password!” he wrote in an email.

Buying and selling profiles is just one of many unsavory tactics in the online dating industry. One site owner referred to these practices as “black hat dating.”

“There is a lot of tricky stuff that people do out there that most people don’t know about,” said David Evans, who started the profile editing service Profile Doctor in 2002 and now writes the blog Online Dating Insider and consults for dating startups.

The industry has been dominated by a few giants for about a decade: eHarmony and Match.com, which each claim 20 million members. But recently, niche sites like JDate, ChristianMingle, AsianBeauties.com, Must Love Pets and FarmersOnly have become trendy.

Each new dating site needs faces for its catalog, and much of the dubious behavior is driven by the need for more profiles. “I talk to dating startups a couple times a week,” Mr. Evans said. “Everyone wants to talk about the cold database problem.”

A close cousin to the profile seller is the “white label” dating service. Want to start a new dating site? White label databases are often used to pre-populate niche sites. With services like Dating Factory, WhiteLabelDating or World Dating Partners, you can tap into a large database, slap your logo on top, and advertise that you have hundreds of thousands of members. As new people sign up for your site, their profiles get copied into the main database to be reused by other sites.

Sometimes the white label-powered sites ask new customers where they want their profiles to appear, but usually it’s a clause buried deep in the terms of service that allows “affiliate sites” to share profiles. Did you sign up for HotEquestrianDates? Your profile might show up on BikerRomance—which could make for an awkward first date. But since daters tend to find out about this practice when they get a message from someone who’s interested, the transgression is often forgiven.

World Dating Partners, an 11-year-old service based in the U.K.that claims 6.5 million active profiles, makes sure each message appears as if the sender is registered on the same site as the user. “We’ve got large sites in our system,” Mark Edwards, sales director for World Dating Partners, told Betabeat, although he declined to name any clients. “We have a very strict policy, like a doctor-patient relationship.”

Companies that own many dating sites also share profiles across their networks; for example, profiles from HornyMatches.com might be shown to people on LonelyWivesAffairs.com, both of which are owned by PimpMansion.com.

The photo sold with Mr. Siddiqui's profile. It is not him.

Beyond the cold database problem and its problematic solutions, scammers remain an issue on online dating sites. Fraudsters living in Eastern Europe put up thousands of fake profiles for girls who claim to need money for a visa, Mr. Evans said. “You can always tell a fake Eastern bloc profile,” Mr. Evans said. “The 22-year-old girl who looks like she’s 14, and she’s got her boobs out and she’s squished them together with her elbows... ‘I would like to be meeting you.’ The minute you see that fractured English you know. But people don’t see that, because dating sites sell hope.”

A few years ago, he realized a curious thing that bodes poorly for anyone who hopes to find true love online. “Guys will pay $25 a month just to flirt with people on the Internet even if they are fake,” he said. “Millions of men spend money just to flirt with women that they know they’re never going to meet.”

Mr. Siddiqui's real photo.

For the online daters who wrote back to Betabeat, the hazards come with the territory. “When a profile is written in fluent English and I receive messages that are grammatically poor, then I get suspicious,” Saleem Siddiqui, a 42-year-old Londoner, said in an email. “Also, many of the ‘fake’ members say they live in the UK but never use British spelling (e.g. colour instead of color). However, I haven’t experienced anyone trying to extort money from me in recent years.”

Alex Furmansky, a Ukranian-born New Yorker who graduated magna cum laude from Wharton in 2007, has wanted to start a dating site since college. He quit his job last year to start Sparkology, a members-only dating site for educated young professionals, in order to avoid the kind of skeezy cruising he’d observed on sites with huge databases. Mr. Furmansky became increasingly disillusioned with online dating as he learned more about it. Hoping to get Sparkology on one of the many sites that claim to objectively rate dating services, he realized most of the reviewers wanted him to pay to play. When he asked for a candid review, he was told “it would be easier” if he had an affiliate linking program so the review site could collect a commission for referring customers.

Mr. Furmansky was further scandalized by a pitch from SaleDatingProfiles offering to sell profiles. “When we got that email, I yelled at my colleagues for even showing it to me because I didn’t want a trace of it in my inbox,” he said. “It was like a slap in the face, like, ‘is this really how it works?’”

SaleDatingProfiles is based in Israel and Russia, a representative told Betabeat over Skype, and operates 150 dating sites of its own, which she declined to name. SaleDatingProfiles says its profiles come from users who signed up for a dating site in its network. New customers must agree to terms of service that include a clause: “The Company has the right to exchange the profiles of Members with other Dating Websites in order to help our Members to find perfect marches [sic]. Also this will give them more wide choice.”

BuyProfiles.com did not respond to a request for comment. But a representative for DatingProfilesSale.com corresponded with Betabeat by email. Six years ago, he tried to build his own dating site, he said. “Nobody can start dating business without profiles,” he wrote. “People come only to dating sites where [there] are many other people.” He found a Ukrainian website that had left its profiles and email addresses exposed and copied about 100,000 profiles. Next he offered his 100,000 profiles to World Dating Partners in exchange for 100,000 additional profiles and built up the business from there. (World Dating Partners says it does not trade profiles with other sites, but acknowledged that it recently changed ownership so it’s possible such a thing happened in the past.)

DatingProfilesSale.com now has a number of large customers, he said, but he would not reveal which ones. “Yes, it’s big sites like eHarmony, but Internet companies basically keep in secret how they run [their] business. If I tell you their secrets, then they will be mad [at] me,” he wrote. “I have hundreds [of] satisfied customers but I am not sure if they want popularize [that] they buy profiles from me.”

Badoo, Match.com, OKCupid, PlentyOfFish and Spark Networks, which owns Spark.com, JDate and ChristianMingle, expressly denied buying or selling profiles. “We are dedicated to building safe, secure and authentic online communities that help strengthen the various communities we serve, and buying or selling profiles does not align with this mission,” a representative for Spark said in an email. EHarmony did not respond to a request for comment.

In general, it’s mostly small players that buy profiles, Mr. Evans said. “It’s these latecomers, like people still trying to start dating sites,” he said. “Like, oh my God, don’t you have anything better to do?”

“If you just go on some of the sketchier dating sites on the web, you start to have this experience of ‘Are these people real? What’s going on here?’” said Aaron Schildkrout, who co-founded the New York–based dating startup HowAboutWe and coined “black hat dating.” The bad actors hurt the industry, he said. “At the same time, it allows more authentic experiences like the one we’re trying to create to stand out and be a breath of fresh air in a sort of tundra of iniquity.”

Mark Brooks, a consultant and publicist who works exclusively with Internet dating companies, said he once fired a client for buying profiles. “When people have a bad experience on any Internet dating site, they just label it ‘Internet dating. ‘Internet dating sucks!’” he told Betabeat. “I don’t work with anybody who’s bad for the industry because in ten years time I won’t be working with anybody, because there won’t be an industry.”

A version of this story appeared in the New York Observer the week of March 28, 2012.

via www.onlinedating.org

The basic premise of OkCupid, Match.com, or eHarmony seems to be that science, or at least math, is a better judge of a potential partner than you are. While you (fallible human) may fall for a winsome smile, the algorithm knows whether that guy or gal is too religious or kinky or short for you to really get along.

However a new report commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science calls bullshit, basically. Along with four other psychology professors, Northwestern's Eli Finkel found that while dating sites are a "terrific addition," the algorithms they employ are no better than having a "real estate agent of love," says Reuters. Does that mean they try to get you to go out with someone who is soulmate-adjacent?

Although Prof. Finkel didn't have access to the dating sites' proprietary algorithms, he told Reuters: "The assumption is they work. We reviewed the literature and feel safe to conclude they do not."

While the algorithm may reduce the number of potential partners from thousands to a few, they have never met and may be as incompatible as two people meeting at random, Finkel said, adding the odds are no better than finding a relationship by strolling into any bar.

We think what Prof. Finkfel meant to say there was, "Drink up, Forever Alones!"

Not yelling.

On the heels of IAC's impressive year-end financials—showing revenues up 26 percent to $2.1 billion and profits up 75 percent to $174 million—the Financial Times decided to profile CEO Greg Blatt.

Mr. Blatt, if you recall, was put in place as Barry Diller's successor in December, 2010. A former lawyer at Watchell Lipton, he helped take Martha Stewart Omnimedia public in 1994 and helped IAC spin off online properties like Expedia and Ticketmaster during the company's "disaggregation period."

But where Mr. Diller grabbed headlines as CEO, Mr. Blatt operates more under-the-radar. So without further ado, here are some other things we learned about Mr. Blatt today:

1. He's a yeller.

Greg Blatt is talking fast and loud. So loud that, after a while, your ears begin to hurt. It is as if he’s at a sports match and is shouting to be heard above the roar of the crowd. . . .

Mr Blatt is also shouting because, well, that’s the kind of guy he is. “It’s been this incredible combination of execution and innovation,” he says in his amplified voice. (“That wasn’t loud for him,” an assistant later explains.)

2. He does not have any ant farms, in case you were wondering.

On his desk, next to unopened bottles of bourbon and a flask engraved with “Match.com”, is a picture of him with friends at the 2002 Super Bowl, which his home town New England Patriots won. “I’m just a guy,” he says. “I go to the beach in the summer and ski in winter. I don’t have any ant farms. I don’t collect stamps.”

3. He does not need Match.com, the IAC subsidiary he once headed, to get a date.

He is unmarried – and has even cancelled his subscription to Match.com. “I’m a single guy,” he says. “I have a bunch of friends in the city. I date ladies from time to time.”

4. He used to not know where to put his olive pit.

Before one critical meeting, Ms. Stewart took Mr Blatt out for hors d’oeuvres to talk over the deal. “We’re sitting there and I suddenly realise the olive in my mouth had a pit,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what the proper etiquette was. I considered swallowing it. She said, ‘Greg, you know what you do with the pit?’ Then she put her fingers in her mouth and put it on the table. She has a good sense of humour.”

5. There was also a point where he was not familiar with the Internet:

“I went to law school because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he says, throwing his hands up in the air. “If someone had asked me if I would be working in the internet after law school I would have said: ‘What’s the internet?’”

BONUS: One thing we learned about IAC chairman Barry Diller: he picks out his own carpet.

Is that even a real flower? Tell us or we'll shoot.

Maybe you should take it easy on the second helpings at Thanksgiving. CNET has gotten its hands on a statement that's supposed to be delivered by the Justice Department today that would make things like using a fake name on Facebook or entering a false weight on Match.com a crime. Salman Rushdie, we hope you're paying attention.

In the statement, the DOJ argues that the agency needs to be able to prosecute violations of a website's "terms of service" policy.  While it opens users up to potentially frivolous violations, the DOJ says scaling back the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA),  "would make it difficult or impossible to deter and address serious insider threats through prosecution," such as identity theft, privacy invasions, or abuse of government databases.

For example, the conviction of Lori Drew, the woman who was charged under  CFAA for violating MySpace's terms of service for bullying a 13-year-old girl who then committed suicide, was thrown out due to limitations in the law.

That happened because a portion of the CFAA--a general purpose prohibition on any act on a computer that "exceeds authorized access"--was not meant to be used to police crimes like Ms. Drew's.

As CNET explains, "To the Justice Department, this means that a Web site's terms of service define what's 'authorized' or not, and ignoring them can turn you into a felon."

Naturally, there are many opposed to this power grab by the DOJ. A coalition including the ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and FreedomWorks warns writes in a letter sent to the Senate in August:

"If a person assumes a fictitious identity at a party, there is no federal crime," the letter says. "Yet if they assume that same identity on a social network that prohibits pseudonyms, there may again be a CFAA violation. This is a gross misuse of the law."

Wait, who are these people assuming fake identities at parties? Where can we meet them? We need some tips on pulling off this Russian billionaire venture capitalist persona we've been working on.

A FEW MONTHS AGO, AN ENTREPRENEUR in the tri-state area was soliciting web development help via Craigslist. “I’m looking for a Meetup.com clone script,” the listing said. “It must have all the social community features that Meetup.com has, including the capability to add new groups, users events, polls, connect to other social communities, shopping cart, sponsors and sub sites.” Meetup, which was founded in 2002 and has about 80 employees, is reportedly valued at more than $50 million. The asking price for a replica was $300 to $600.

Last week, two ads appeared from the other side of the fence: a programmer-for-hire looking for something to build who claimed to have built a Facebook clone in four days, a Flickr clone in three days and a Google clone in two weeks. He noted that he’d also created a Craigslist clone, adding, “but no one visits it so we are posting this ad to Craigslist.”*

When it comes to internet startups, much is made of the entrepreneurs who first bring an idea to market—innovators or "first movers," in the parlance of market researchers. But vastly more common are “fast followers,” the ones who jump on a hot idea and dash off a carbon copy. After all, the first mover doesn’t always win the race: just look at the Mac, launched in 1984, versus the Windows PC, launched in 1985, or at Facebook, which came after Friendster, Myspace and the Winklevoss social network HarvardConnection.

Turntable.fm, a music streaming service that went viral immediately after its April launch, was built in about six months by three entrepreneurs based in Union Square. About two months later, a local trio of former Googlers launched a music streaming game called Rolling.fm.

The similarity was more than striking. Both sites are designed to look like a cartoon night club where users can join a rotating line-up of D.J.s and play songs for a crowd of tiny avatars. Turntable listeners rate songs as “lame” or “awesome,” while users on Rolling rate them “weak” or “hot.” On Turntable, users appear as ambiguous elf-animals that get bigger as they accrue more D.J. points; on Rolling, the characters look like Homie dolls that get more bling as they level up. “I think it’s obvious that the initial version of Rolling is inspired by Turntable,” Rolling co-founder Tim Zhou said carefully in an email. “To say otherwise is not accurate.”

Fast followers have been around since the days of the first dot-com boom. Even Kozmo.com, the website that offered free one-hour delivery of almost any product and is considered one of the classic flame-outs of the 90's tech bubble, had, despite its dubious business model, an imitator.

According to Silicon Alley Reporter publisher Jason Calacanis, one venture capitalist Kozmo pitched—Ross Stevens of Integrity Capital Management—liked the idea so much he launched a competitor. “They started something called Urbanfetch, which was a direct knockoff,” Mr. Calacanis said. This led to a legal settlement as well as retaliatory mischief; at one point, Kozmo had five employees order packs of M&Ms delivered to the office every hour, “just to see if Urbanfetch would do it,” Mr. Calacanis said.

Me-too startups seem to be popping up with increasing intensity amid the current wave of social media–centric web-based businesses, in which easy programming languages, the availability of ready-made tools, open source code and a reinvigorated supply of capital has everyone aspiring to internet entrepreneurship. “It’s this whole cargo cult thing, where people imitate the things you see on the surface,” web developer and serial entrepreneur Kyle Bragger told Betabeat. “Foursquare does badges and they did them really well. And then all of a sudden everyone was like, ‘I want to add badges to my startup!’”

There are more than 200 variations of the “daily deal” group discount site Groupon (commonly referred to as the “Groupon clones") in the U.S. alone. In China, more than 1,000 have been launched and several hundred more are offering deals around the world, according to the New York-based deal aggregator and market researcher Yipit. These carbon copies range from bit-for-bit replicas to fairly creative takes on the concept of temporary group discounts.

Groupon’s wild success inspired Google to launch its own take on the daily deal site, Google Offers; at the other end of the knockoff spectrum, some intrepid entrepreneurs started offering a quick-and-dirty $350 software kit called Wroupon, which imitates Groupon’s daily deal conceit as well as the layout and language to generate “the perfect Groupon clone.”

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

Meanwhile, the proliferation of "patent trolling," frivolous lawsuits brought against startups based on overreaching software patents, has been in the news lately. How can overzealous intellectual property prosecution coincide with a rise of the clones?

The reasons for both have to do with the country's overloaded, backed-up patent system. A startup’s design and branding can be protected with a copyright or trademark, which takes six months to a year to process. A new technology or method, like Groupon’s “tipping point,” would need to be protected with a patent in order for Groupon to take its clones to court. But a patent application usually takes two or three or three years to be examined—an eternity for a web 2.0 startup—and it’s never certain whether it will be granted, said Elliot Furman, a patent lawyer who has a masters degree in engineering from Stanford and specializes in software and web start-ups. And even if a company owns a patent, legal action is difficult, time-consuming and expensive. Pursuing a case is often not worth it to a young startup, especially those in the earlier stage who are working with limited funds.

Groupon, for example, can’t sue for patent infringement: it doesn't own any patents yet. The startup filed for a patent on its flash deal mechanism, “a system and methods to mutually satisfy a consumer with a discount and a vendor with a minimum number of sales by establishing a tipping point associated with an offer for a good or service,” in 2009. That and five other applications are still pending. The patents are very specific: rather than attempting to patent the idea of a tipping point-based discount, the application describes a series of 10 successive actions that describe Groupon’s particular implementation. But Groupon has raised more than a billion dollars and therefore has the resources to pursue other kinds of intellectual property lawsuits. The company sued at least one of its clones, the Australia-based Scoopon, for registering the trademark “Groupon” and squatting on groupon.com.au. The case settled out of court. Facebook game-maker Zynga, another billion-dollar company, is suing São Paulo-based Vostu for copyright infringement while simultaneously defending itself against a lawsuit from Los Angeles-based SocialApps, which is suing Zynga for copyright infringement, violations of the California Uniform Trade Secrets Act and other claims.

SocialApps claims that Zynga used its code to build Farmville without adequate compensation. But most derivative startups don’t steal code—they look at a site and reverse-engineer what they see. “Most of these companies are using more or less standardized protocols,” Mr. Furman said. “They may even be using off-the-shelf software.” The service built on top of the technology, he said, is in most cases what companies want to legally protect with patents for the way the service works, copyrights for the way it looks and trademarks for the name and branding.

Fast-follower startups are an international industry, much like the “fast fashion houses” such as H&M and Zara that spot a new design on the runway and place cheap knockoff in stores just months later. China has its own versions of most successful startups—which, conveniently enough, tend to be blocked by the government’s censors—including Twitter, Facebook, Google, Quora and a score of Tumblr clones such as Dian Dian, which differentiated itself in its first iteration with Chinese writing and a darker shade of blue. German entrepreneurs Oliver, Marc and Oliver Samwer are notorious for producing copycat start-ups. The brothers attempted to partner with eBay to launch the German version of the auction site; when eBay didn’t respond, they made their own--which they sold to eBay for $50 million four months after it went live, according to the New York Times. Oliver Samwer co-authored a book in 1998 called America’s Most Successful Startups: Lessons for Entrepreneurs. One of their incubated startups, Wimdu, is a mirror image of the short-term rentals site Airbnb which is valued at $1 billion dollars. Airbnb said of Wimdu: “These scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original.” Wimdu told us it’s building a business, not angling to be bought.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

But unlike the so-called patent trolls—companies that exist solely to extract money from new start-ups via broad, vaguely-worded software patents—the fast followers are considered an acceptable part of the web ecosystem rather than contemptible parasites. Like the fast fashion houses, fast follower startups serve different markets, iterate on the originals, and keep first movers moving fast to stay ahead.

As University of Washington professor and former Microsoftie Scott Berkun says in his book The Myths of Innovation, all new inventions are basically collaborative. Technology evolves by group effort. Even the Chinese clones, safe in their protected market, eventually start innovating on the original ideas. “Zhihu [Quora clone] and DianDian [Tumblr clone] are following a common pattern of Chinese internet companies. Copy first, innovate later,” Kai Lukoff wrote on the Chinese tech blog TechRice. “Clones though they may be at present, I personally find myself rooting for these upstarts.”

In January, Match.com introduced a feature called DateSpark, which Aaron Schildkrout, co-founder of the local dating site HowAboutWe, thought looked familiar. “The Match implementation was, like, a very overt copy of HowAboutWe, the language, the design,” Mr. Schildkrout said. “It was kind of like an ugly, poor duplicate of what we had built. I felt like it was a little lame but I understand why they would do it and felt simultaneously that it was really affirming.” Match.com did not respond to a request for comment.

Hitting back, HowAboutWe offered Match.com subscribers a three-month subscription for free, though Mr. Schildkrout sounded decidedly unthreatened by the larger company. “The core outdated lameness of Match persisted,” he said. “It would have been cool if they did what we did and did it better, so we could learn from them.”

Does HowAboutWe copy other people? we asked.

“Yeah, constantly,” he said, citing Twitter and OKCupid. “I wouldn't say copy but we have taken huge pieces of ideas from other people and their great implementations—that’s part of what being a great user experience designer is. I think that’s a healthy dialogue that exists between competing companies.”

HowAboutWe has not attempted to patent the idea of a dating site built around proposing date ideas. “Our task is to be incredibly innovative, creative, try things quickly and figure out what works, kill what doesn't work, continue to iterate on what does, and therefore beat out anybody that's trying to copy us,” he said.

Entrepreneurs do often have identical ideas independently as technological evolution makes new things possible. The emergence of services like Twilio, which makes it easy for developers to send text messages and make phone calls from mobile apps, inspired a staggering number of group texting startups around the same time, including GroupMe, Groupie, Fast Society and the recently-folded Freespeech, and that’s just in New York. Mr. Furman gets waves of clients who ask him about patenting the same thing. “In a month, six or seven people come to me with virtually the same idea!” he told Betabeat.

But it’s a different story when there is a possibility of consumer confusion. A trademark application takes only six to 12 months to process, and it only costs a few hundred bucks to send a cease-and-desist letter, as the New York-based founders of the application-hosting service Nodejitsu did when an Arizona startup offering the same service launched under the similar name NodeFu.

At the time, the NodeFu website referred indirectly to Nodejitsu: “We started this project because the ‘other’ node.js hosting services were not sending out coupon invitations.” But NodeFu’s founder Chris Matthieu said the branding was unrelated. “There is a trend in the software industry now around ninjas and apps/sites ending in the suffix ‘fu,’” he said in an email. “In addition for my fondness of ninjas, my son is also a black belt in karate and a red belt in kungfu. I have been surrounded by martial arts for 14 years now. There really isn’t that much in common between the Nodefu and Nodejitsu sites other than being oriental. I didn’t see any ninjas on their site. Not sure what the big deal is nor do I see any concerns with copyright.”

Still, Mr. Matthieu later changed his company’s name to Nodester.

Check Out A Side By Side Comparison of Fast Followers, From Wroupon to FreundeFeed

*UPDATE: This ad turned out to be a parody. "This can't possibly generate any responses, I thought," writes Ted Dziuba, the listing's author. "Nope. 31 replies in about 2 hours, before Craigslist pulled the post."

A version of this story appeared in print in the New York Observer the week of Sept. 2, 2011.

For five dollars, customers got the chance to answer hundreds of questions where they offered their like, dislike and philosophies of life. Men got to choose their favorite hairstyle, women their favorite scene of a man at work. These answer were transferred to punch cards and fed into an I.B.M. 1400 Series. It got 5,000 subscribers in the first year.

It expanded from the Upper East Side, at the time a hotbed of sexual daring, to cover the entire city. The stigma associated with online dating was present from the beginning. "Some people think computer dating services attract only losers," reads some TACT ad copy Mr. Paumgarten sampled. "This loser happens to be a talented fashion illustrator for one of New York's largest advertising agencies. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. Some loser!"

Mr. Ross ended up meeting his wife, a reporter for 1010 WINS, on a story about TACT. Years later Paumgarten went on one of the only two dates in his life with the daughter of this union. They took in a Broadway play and went out for Chinese food. He ordered a tequila sunrise. Things didn't work out.

But back in April, when OKCupid wrote a post called "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating," the companies weren't so sweet on each other.

OKCupid's datahound Christian Rudder used publicly available data to guess at the success rates of eHarmony and Match.com, and decided they came up short.

"Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize," Mr. Rudder wrote, before launching into an analysis that concluded that more than 93 percent of Match's profiles were "dead," meaning abandoned or owned by free-riding users who haven't paid for the ability to respond.

"It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com," he wrote.

Now that Match.com has bought OKCupid, that post has been removed from OKCupid's blog—setting off suspicions about whether the acquisition means the scrappy, fun OKCupid is being forced to button up by its new owners.

But Match.com didn't ask OKCupid to take down the post, CEO Sam Yagan told The Observer, it was just the "common sense thing to do."

"I know everyone wants to make a big deal out of this," he said. "They didn't tell us take it down. I wanted to do it. ... We obviously believe in a free model but there are also paid models and I didn't think [the post's] continued existence served much of a purpose. People will say, 'Oh my God, they've sold out and they're censoring it,' that's fine. When we put our next blog post next week and keep being awesome and the product keeps being awesome and free, people will just realize they're overreacting."

Furthermore, the data that OKCupid gathered from Match.com's public filings and press kit were not completely accurate, he said, which he realized once he saw the real data.

"Upon having more knowledge as we've gone through the process of getting to know Match and them getting to know us, some of the conclusions we drew are not quite as exaggerated as we made them out to be," he said.

Mr. Yagan did not reveal what the real data says or how big the discrepancy was, but said that Match.com is better at getting people together than he originally believed. "In general the totality of data that we have become exposed to leads us to believe that yes, the subscription sites are probably more successful than the post made them out to be," he said.

And even though the two sites are now playing for the same team, it'll be business as usual at OKCupid's Midtown office, he said. OKCupid will remain free and OKTrends will keep publishing the popular research it culls from its members. (Data from Match.com and its affiliated sites will not be included.)

Match and its associated sites may run ads on OKCupid, but that hasn't happened yet and the intention is not to have OKCupid be a feeder site for the subscription sites, he said, Match.com just wants to have a full portfolio of different kinds of dating sites. "I don't know what their grand strategy is. Right now we don't run any Match ads... the plan is just for each of the sites to run their own business. Where there are opportunities to cooperate we want to and we will."

"We're not moving offices. We're not integrating the user bases, not integrating the technology platforms, not integrating the brands," he said. "I'm running the business and I don't know how to run a subscription business. It's not something I've done or want to do."

OKCupid has about seven million users, most of whom joined over the last two years even though the site has been up for five. They're rolling out a mobile app that will be location-aware in the next few months.

It will be interesting to see if the acquisition has any visible impact on OKCupid, but from talking to Mr. Yagan it sounds like it won't.

"I think the most successful acquisitions are those where not a lot is done to radically change the business model of the company," he said.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

The press release indicates that OKCupid will not be shut down and its users siphoned into one of Match.com's subscription-based dating sites. OKCupid cofounder Sam Yagan will head up the company's New York office and continue to run the company's day-to-day operations. "We are excited to join forces with Match because it is clear that no company is more committed to helping people find relationships," he said. "This marriage offers us the best of both worlds: the autonomy to continue pursuing OkCupid's original vision and the ability to leverage Match's reach and expertise to grow even faster."

Match.com and OKCupid are now owned by New York's IAC, which operates some of the best-known properties on the web.

There's already speculation that OKCupid will lose some of its fun hipster personality. Already a blog post titled, "Why You Should Never Pay for Online Dating," has been removed.

An excerpt from that post:

Today I'd like to show why the practice of paying for dates on sites like Match.com and eHarmony is fundamentally broken, and broken in ways that most people don't realize.

For one thing, their business model exacerbates a problem found on every dating site:

Women get too many bad matches

Men get far too few replies

For another thing, as I'll explain, pay sites have a unique incentive to profit from their customers' disappointment.

As a founder of OkCupid I'm of course motivated to point out our competitors' flaws. So take what I have to say today with a grain of salt. But I intend to show, just by doing some simple calculations, that pay dating is a bad idea; actually, I won't be showing this so much as the pay sites themselves, because most of the data I'll use is from Match and eHarmony's own public statements. I'll list my sources at the bottom of the post, in case you want to check.

...

It turns out you are 12.4 times more likely to get married this year if you don't subscribe to Match.com.

...

So next time you hear Match or eHarmony talking about how huge they are, you should do like I do and think of Goliath-and how he probably bragged all the time about how much he could bench. Then you should go sign up for OkCupid.

Hopefully OKCupid will keep its personality and its trendy trends blog intact despite being acquired by its 16-year old cousin.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries