So a friend directed me to a dating site the other day. It’s by a bunch of people, some of whom are responsible for a site called The Spark, which was the home of oddly-accurate personality tests. OKCupid.com. It’s reallywell put together. As a software developer with a penchant for that agile stuff and for whom “well, you carve away all the parts [of the marble block] that aren’t the angel” resonates, the fact that the team behind it have put every effort into the core features of what a dating site is (for some, that’s getting them laid; for others, it’s meeting new people) really shines through. Not only is it packed full of really cool features, but it doesn’t have anything that rates “a bit **” in it (that I’ve seen so far, anyhow; I’m highly critical like that!). There’s no dross. It practically **glowsas an example of software that has been tuned to help the people using it.

The recommendations engine is … scary. It seems to work by collecting data from (at least) your answering multiple-choice questions; it takes your answers into account, much like I imagine Last.fm’s musical neighbourhood algorithm works (or at least, that’s what I dimly remember reading about). But it also asks you what you’d want your ideal match to answer (here, you can pick more than one choice), and rate how important that answer would be to you. It’s engaging. It’s accessible and intuitive. It encourages you to do “just one more!”, and addicts you. One can submit one’s own questions and attendant answers; I imagine there’s a bucket of thousands upon thousands by now.

There’s a fully-featured quiz feature, too, where one can take tests - again, multiple-choice, but here you’re scored within the context of the test and given a result at the end. I was in stitches most of the way through The Gentleman Test, which is one of a myriad user-contributed tests (though you might need to sign in to see it; no idea). This, quite frankly, is Web 2.0 user-generated-content at its finest!

It’s possible to compare one’s profile to that of someone one is interested in, and see both little graphs of how they differ, but also how far each deviates from the general population. It’s got AJAX that actually doesprogressively enhance functionality (not that I’ve tried it with JS turned off). It updates without needing to refresh the page, and it does chat in a clever way; it seems to also use some server-push or comet. It loads fast. Its design is nice, and doesn’t break due to AdBlock removing the ads.

Chiefly; it conspires to be addictive. From the wording of the hint-text (“oh, you want to upload a file? [local] [website] Great! Tell us where it is: [file input]” instead of just “upload photo: [file input]”) to the way that they’ve added keyboard shortcuts to the question-answering part, to the generally … bouncy, bright-eyed feel of the site as a whole. As I said, everything I’ve found so far is geared to serving me, the user, to get what I want, and that’s rarewith software (which in itself is a pretty sad state of affairs).

It’s refreshing to see software done so well.