How I Met Your Mother, season 1, episode “Matchmaker”: Ted signs up for a matchmaking service (suggested by Marshall and Lily and tricked by Barney into doing it) called Love Solutions to find his “perfect match”. The matchmaking service originally finds his chances for finding his soulmate are zero and that the closest match to Ted is a woman who is already engaged [1].
14 years ago, we liked to imagine that our technology was so advanced that it could allow us to find the perfect match, but it didn’t quite workout, right, Ted?
As a modern day, hairier and balder (and maybe a bit more data aware, I like to believe), Carrie Bradshaw, I would like to provide an answer to this question: in Ted’s case, that was just not where the plot was heading (the answer to the 9 season long sitcom was never “Tinder”), but from a technical point of view there are two reasons why this wouldn’t have worked: the lack data about every single individual (it’s very unlikely that everyone could have been registered on the dating platform) and the lack of understanding on exactly why two (or more?) individuals click.
The lack of data
If you really wanted to compare your compatibility with any other man/woman in the world, you would need to have them in the system. Was everyone on a dating app 10 years ago? Certainly not. Is everyone on Tinder now? Also no, but we are getting closer to it. Is everyone on Facebook now? Still no, but kind of. Facebook just implemented a service called Facebook Dating [2], which turns the social media platform back to its original form: a dating website. Adding all of the subscribers to the world’s biggest social network might get us closer to bringing as many people as possible to the same database, thus enabling the company to use all their personal information for matchmaking, especially since Facebook seems to be gathering and centralizing data about us from all different sources (even Whatsapp [3]) .
Finding the right match
If the biggest social media platform in the world starts exploiting its data for match making, we might get pretty close to solving the first problem, but the other knot left to untangle is how to use the data to match people and create suggestions according to a certain user’s characteristics. Matching individuals with common interests seems like the most trivial way to have a good fit, but the interaction dynamics that these individuals will have upon meeting is a whole new challenge that hasn’t really been tackled and it remains a question to be answered by the involved parties in real life. If these mechanisms were to be refined and the matching system was to be optimized, it might allow for (allow me to close the circle) “legen, wait for it, dary” relationships.
It might seem slight controversial, but will harnessing user’s data from all sources get us closer to a world where technology can really bring us closer to our best match?
References:
[1] Ted’s Love Solutions Match, https://how-i-met-your-mother.fandom.com/wiki/Ted%27s_Love_Solutions_Match
[2] It’s Facebook Official, Dating Is Here, https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/09/facebook-dating/
[3] Is Facebook reading my ‘encrypted’ WhatsApp conversations?, https://hackernoon.com/facebook-is-reading-my-encrypted-whatsapp-conversations-375d2eba0c18
off topic: Using HIMYM in a blog post? Instant 5 star rating.
I can’t imagine Facebook dating taking off in the Netherlands (when we get it). I feel like people barely trust Facebook nowadays, and definitely do not want to date on a platform that connects with all their friends.
A Chinese music platform named NetEase Cloud Music are doing something like what you mentioned. The platform will match the users with similar music taste in the future. One of the goals of doing so is to help the user to find another user who has similar music taste. And then they might start a friendship or relationship.
This kind of match can hardly be done without the platform. Because the platform has all the data about your listening records, and can easily make a match when the amount of users is big enough. If a person do not use the paltform, the match done by the person himself or herslef can be quite time consuming and difficult.