App Yoke Finally Cracks Facebook Dating

Posted By: jitesh verma - Saturday, July 28, 2012

Share

& Comment

Finally, a dating site where you can find someone to actually date, not just sleep with. New dating app Yoke matches you with single friends of friends you’re truly compatible with but who don’t even need to be Yoke users. Yoke does this by comparing  you and their Facebook Likes and listening activity with datasets from Amazon, Netflix, Echo Nest, and a proprietary college graph. That lets Yoke show you potential dates because “you listen to Lil Wayne and she listens to Jay-Z”, or “You went to Stanford and he went to MIT”.
It’s got a dead simple Facebook app interface, and lets you ask mutual friends for introductions. These all combine to give Yoke the power to challenge sites like OkCupid and succeed where strict matchmaking sites like Thread failed.
Yoke was founded by ex-Huffington Post social media editor Rob Fishman, and Jeff Revesz who sold his company Adaptive Semantics to HuffPo in 2009. It’s backed by a $500,000 seed round led by Lerer Ventures and joined by SoftBank Capital.
First reason Yoke’s awesome? You don’t have to create a new profile. You connect to its app and it automatically pulls your Facebook profile and sexual orientation. While most dating sites give you an overwhelming set of browsing options, Yoke just immediately starts showing you potential matches. Dating is already stressful enough, so a calm, straightforward interface is refreshing.
Your Yoke matches aren’t just other users as with most dating sites — they’re any friends of your Facebook friends who list themselves as “Single” and live nearby. You’ll see their public profile photos and a list of shared and similar characteristics such as music listened to; books, movies, and activities Liked; and where you went to college.

Yoke’s site design could use some polish, but it works. My only concern is people might be a little weirded out by getting a message from someone on a dating app they don’t even use. Yoke will need to refine the pre-filled message text to minimize this. It could also let you set preferences for ages you’d like to be matched with.
Fishman tells me Yoke’s lightweight approach that doesn’t require a new profile makes it great for those “who want to meet new people but don’t want to be on a dating site. Yoke resembles how you date in real life — you meet through friends or at a concert because you like the same band.” This beats OkCupid’s unstructured profile data, which means it can’t accurately find you matches that share your interests.
Most dating sites make you constantly wonder, “They’re cute, but will we actually get along?” Yoke could make sure the answer is always yes. The rest is up to you.

Yoke is the first in what is likely to be of a series of Facebook apps from Fishman and Revesz’s new company, Kingfish Labs. The New York-based startup raised $500,000 in seed funding from Lerer Ventures and Softbank Capital in August, and plans to raise another round “sooner or later,” Fishman tells me.

About jitesh verma

Techism is an online Publication that complies Bizarre, Odd, Strange, Out of box facts about the stuff going around in the world which you may find hard to believe and understand. The Main Purpose of this site is to bring reality with a taste of entertainment

Copyright © 2013 fbutilities™ is a registered trademark.

Designed by Templateism. Hosted on Blogger Platform.