OkCupid
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| OkCupid | |
|---|---|
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 The OkCupid homepage on May 28, 2008 |
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| URL | http://www.okcupid.com |
| Commercial? | Mixed |
| Type of site | Online dating service, Social network service |
| Registration | yes |
| Owner | Humor Rainbow, Inc. |
| Created by | Chris Coyne, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn |
| Launched | 2004 |
OkCupid is a free-of-charge social networking and dating website, which in addition also offers features including user-generated content such as blogging and member-created quizzes.
Contents |
[edit] About
OkCupid users are presented with questions (most of which are authored and submitted by members) about various topics such as politics and tastes page by page, and given a list of up to four answers per question to choose from. They are also asked "How would your Ideal Match answer this question?", and then "How important is their answer to you?", with degrees of importance for the latter listed as "irrelevant", "a little important", "somewhat important", "very important", and "mandatory", each respectively assigned a greater numerical value. The site uses the numerical values to calculate "friend", "enemy", and "match" percentages between any two members of the site based on how many answered questions those two users have in common (referred to as their "intersection"), with higher intersections supposedly producing more accurate percentages.
There is a very active journaling/blogging community on OkCupid as well. Members have the option of saving favorite users' profiles and then "stalking" them, which allows them to view all of their new journal entries, as well as comments on others' entries. The journaling community frequently arranges meet-ups of OkCupid users in various areas of the world and people travel, sometimes from as far away as other countries or continents) to meet. Sites of past meet-ups include London, New Orleans, San Francisco, New York City, and Ann Arbor.
[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 Web server (currently at version 1.1.2pre1), 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."[1]
[edit] History
OkCupid is a service of Humor Rainbow, Inc. OkCupid’s founders, (Chris Coyne, Christian Rudder, Sam Yagan, and Max Krohn) were students at Harvard University when they gained notoriety from their creation of TheSpark and, later, SparkNotes. In 2001, they sold these properties to Barnes & Noble, and began work on OkCupid.[2]
In 2007, the developers began operating CrazyBlindDate.com in New York and other selected cities.
