Cherrypick, the online dating service that takes the anonymity out of dating and gives would-be matchmakers a prominent role, has expanded beyond its iPhone app to android devices, tablets, and the web.
Cherrypick relies on several interesting technologies, including facial recognition, artificial intelligence, and collaborative filtering, to match people and recommend activities for their first (and subsequent) date(s).
Users sign on to the SF-based service with their Facebook account. Cherrypick pre-populates your profile with some of your social graph information, which you can then edit.
“We've learned a lot about people's eligibility status,” says CEO Sophie-Charlotte Moatti. “On Facebook only in ten percent of the cases is somebody’s relationship status clear. So we've built an inference engine based on their profile picture and the nature of their network. It is seventy-five percent accurate.”
I’d never really thought about what a profile photo says about your relationship status before, so Moatti filled me in.
“How available are you in the photo? Are you facing straight on or facing off sideways? Do you have sunglasses? Do you show your whole body or just your face? We’ve found that if you look straight on and smile, you are more likely single.”
As for those guys who choose action photos for their profile pictures, such as jumping out of airplanes? They tend not to be single people, she says.
As for what people choose to do on a first date, Moatti listed music concerts and city tours as popular, with skydiving and martial arts not so much so.
Moatti’s team has partnered with Yelp, Groupon and Living Social to recommend roughly twenty different activities for dates.
The service features a “news” section, which shows who have been “Cherrypicked” by others.
There’s a certain emphasis on matchmaking, where friends can help friends meet new people.
In the background, Cherrypick goes beyond Facebook to leverage other social networks to infer a person’s age range, if not given, whether they smoke or not, and to create tag clouds.
There’s even an “anti-tag” option.
“For example,” says Moatti, “I don’t like TV, so that is an ‘anti-tag’ for me.”
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