OKCupid

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section is written like an advertisement.
Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view per Wikipedia policy.
Mark blatant advertising for speedy deletion with {{db-spam}}. (help, talk)

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since January 2007.

Screenshot of login page

OkCupid is an online dating service. In addition to standard dating features, OkCupid also offers social networking features including user-generated content.

1 About
2 History
3 Traffic
4 Technical
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] About

OkCupid uses a system to match people together based on answers to questions (most of which are member-submitted) to determine match percentages with other members. Users of OkCupid have a compatibility score calculated between each pair of OkCupid members to aid in finding other compatible people.

OkCupid is one of the very few online dating sites that does not charge for its services.

OKCupid's primary purpose is to serve as a matching service. OKCupid markets itself through boasting its matching technique, which it claims is markedly different from similar online services.

Advertisements support the matching service and community, along with the large number of member-submitted quizzes and questions. (According to the OKCupid Web site, there are more than 21,000 user-created quizzes and more than 2,000 user-created questions in the system as of June 2006.) A significant amount of users join OKCupid only to take these quizzes and tests.

[edit] History

OkCupid is service of Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid’s founders were all students at Harvard University when Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn gained fame and notoriety with the creation of TheSpark and, later, Sparknotes. In 2001, they sold these sites to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OKCupid.

[edit] Traffic

These numbers, unless otherwise specified, are as of January 11, 2006:

Over 4,000,000 accounts have been created.
Over 9,000,000 emails have been sent among OkCupid users.
Over 180,000,000 match questions have been answered.
The average number of users online regularly exceeds 3,000 and peaks over 4,000.
Total site page views around 3,000,000 per day.

[edit] Technical

The Web site makes advanced use of the client-side JavaScript scripting language to generate dynamic distribution graphs. In addition, it uses the OKWS [1] Web server, which was designed by Max Krohn at MIT, to operate fast, high-load Web services.

According to the website, "Currently we have over 200,000 lines of C++ code. That's pretty much everything, except our picture upload scripts, which are in PHP. Offline, we use both perl and python for some little maintenance programs." This makes it one of the few websites that use C++.