Copenda’s New Features Ease Communication

At last we are live!!!

New features to the site include:

• Contact me – Enables one to contact social networking users directly from Copenda. All messages are flawlessly sent by Copenda through his or her social network account.
• Claim my profile – Members can manually add their profiles to Copenda’s search engine and associate existing profiles with their Copenda profile. After “claiming” their social networks and dating sites’ profiles, users will be able to oversee all relevant accounts in one, centralized location called “My Copenda.” Each claimed profile has a link to Copenda’s profile page which contains general information about the Copenda user.
• My Copenda – Users have a personal homepage in which they can manage their favorite profiles, edit their personal information and receive notifications.
  New filter option – Allows members to only have profiles in the search results from their favorite social networks or dating sites, which the user has identified.
• Cool people in this area – Shows people who are in nearby locations with similar interests; this information will appear on the profile page
• Invite my friends - Users are able to invite their friends to Copenda; their list of friends can be entered manually, imported from their email or from other social networking sites.

Here are some links for the Media covarge:

Official PR - http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/05/prweb943574.htm

Mashable - http://mashable.com/2008/05/15/copenda-relaunc/

AltSearchEngines - http://altsearchengines.com/2008/05/15/copenda-a-people-search-engine-for-love/

Meet us at MashBash Tel Aviv

We're proud to be one of the sponsors of MashBash Tel Aviv , Mashable's first International MashMeet and it’s in Tel Aviv!

The event will take place on Wednesday June 11th, 7-10pm, at the Galina Beach Club, Hangar 19, Tel Aviv Port, Israel.

With a new version just behind the corner ,the timing is very good for us.

See you in Tel Aviv...


More details here

Recent online dating and social networks statistics

Mark Brooks the author of online personals watch has recently interviewed ,Alex Burmaster , the Internet dating and social networking specialist for Nielsen Online.

Here are some intersting numbres:

The strongest growing personals sites in the US:

The strongest growing personals sites in the Europe:

The number of people visited dating sites in the USA, and the countries that they cover in the EU, last month

US = 25.8 million
DE = 5.6 million
FR = 4.7 million
UK = 3.6 million
IT = 2.7 million
ES = 2.3 million

The number of people visited social networks in the USA, and the coutries that they cover in the EU, last month?

Member communities category (social networks & blogging)
US = 104 million
UK = 18.9 million
FR = 17.6 million
IT = 15.1 million
DE = 14.6 million
ES = 11.7 million

See full interview here

A sneak peak to the upcoming new version of Copenda - 4, Adding your profile to Copeda

One of the most frequent question asked by the users is how to add their profiles to Copenda.

Well...

The current answer was: it takes time but eventually our crawler will index all profiles.We knew it was not a good answer and we decided to allow users to manually add their profiles to Copenda. In addition users will be able to associate existing profile (allready in Copenda) with their Copenda profile. By claiming your social networks and dating sites profiles you will be able to Contact other users within the same network directly from Copenda,
Track your profiles and get notification when someone ,add new comment to your profile
Use future functionalities such as presence and more.

A sneak peak to the upcoming new version of Copenda - 3, My Copenda

The clock is ticking and the new version is just behind the corner.
Today I will expose one of the most important feature - MyCopenda.
MyCopenda is a personal area which will allow you to:

• Edit your personal information
• View and manage your favorit profiles
• Add your social network profiles to Copenda
• Invite your friends

In the future we plan to extend it to show an aggregated data from your social networks.

The future of today social networks

I have just read a very interesting article in economist.com about the social networks.

"Social networking will become a ubiquitous feature of online life. That does not mean it is a business"

According to the author "The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid Internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag."

Our vision , in Copenda , is that Copenda will become the platform that will bridge the gap between the social networks.
We started it by enabling cross site people search and will go even further in the upcoming version with a new contact me feature that will allow you to contact any user from any social network without leaving Copenda.

Facebook IM service will debut soon

Facebook plans to launch an instant-messaging application for members to embed on their profiles as early as next week, TechCrunch reported Friday.
Details are sketchy, but it appears that this will be a Web-based IM service that would allow Facebook users to chat with other people on their friends lists without needing to go through a third-party program. Additionally, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington detailed, the service would likely be based on the Jabber open-source platform, which would mean that third-party "universal IM" clients like Pidgin, Trillian, and Adium would be able to implement it.
Facebook representatives were not immediately available for comment.

One of the things that we are currently evaluating is a web messenger platform to embed in our search results.
There are couple of good options : Live messenger, Yahoo messenger , Google talk and smaller third parties IMs.
I don't think that Facebook IM can currently compete with these IMs but personaly I will use it in Facebook if it will be embedded like gtalk in Gmail.

Source: Webware.com