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What a loser! If Michaels had only purchased the $999 Platinum Plus MegaDude package, he could have photoshopped his yearbook picture, performed with Elvis, and had virtual sex with the prom queen.

I got hit by such a fake come-on from Yahoo! Personals. I went in for the free part, and shortly thereafter was contacted by somebody. I had to upgrade to paid to reply, did so, and never got an answer. $80.

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The Wired report reads to me like an item in The Onion.

Grackle: I was just going to post the same comment. Nearly word for word.

Here is my first effort:

http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2007/08/30/yahoo-class-action-lawsuit-settled/

Good for him. Sue the daylights out of the scum.

I remember somewhere around the peak of the dot-com frenzy, somebody (was it from razorfish?) gave a presentation to a webbie group here in Tokyo. He kept using the word “monetize”, as in “monetize the users.” Finally, partly because I hated the way he’d braided his wispy little beard or something, I asked, “Do you mean, ‘make money off of'”?

In trying to frame his reply, his facial muscles began to pull so hard in opposing directions that I began to worry for him, and finally said, “Forget it.” I’d been planning to wonkishly engage him, mind-to-mind, on the question of whether “monetize” wouldn’t more properly be construed as “turn into a form of currency, for purposes of trade.” Then I realized he didn’t know his own mind, and was afraid I’d also get lost in his if I ventured in.

In retrospect, that latter sense of “monetize” might be closer to the mark, since we’ve seen a lot of “monetization” attempts fall flat with users. Companies trade your online identity info around, acquired in hopes it’ll be worth more someday. And maybe we’ve had derivatives — and derivatives of derivatives — for those currencies for a while now. Note that a lot of dot-com M&A activity was of the stock-swap variety. Yahoo’s stock-only purchase of eGroups, for example — they were buying access to users, as the coin of some ghostly realm. At more reasonable valuations of Yahoo stock, eGroup’s price wasn’t as gobsmackingly exorbitant as it seemed at the time.

Similar behavior about users and “eyeballs” persists even recently. It’s not quite right to say, for example, that Google bought YouTube for a billion dollars or whatever the quoted figure was. Google handed over Google stock (or options on such stock) to YouTube. Look at Google stock today. Do we say now that Google bought YouTube for half a billion dollars, not a billion, because of that drop in valuation while most of the options were still not fully vested? What if Google stock halves again? No, this is all more like swings in the values of currencies against each other.

Maybe in the future, instead of 15 minutes of fame each, we’ll all have 15 individual dollar bills (but no more, you don’t want hyperinflation) each with a picture of ourselves, to issue to the Internet Ghost Economy. All of us, that is, except for the anarchists, the gold-bug libertarians, and the privacy mavens, who will wear t-shirts saying “monetize this!” (The privacy mavens will be wearing hoods as well, so that no counterfeiters can snap their pictures and issue dollars with their images.)

There was also the Rapleaf thing from last year – there was a company called ‘Upscoop’ that offered to check your online contacts and see which social networking sites they used. If you entered those contact names, they all had profiles created on Rapleaf, and got messages from Rapleaf saying their reputations had been searched there, do they want to update their profiles?

Say, doesn’t that Quiggin feller blog here? I keep trying to friend him on Facebook, but he never replies.

I just found out my high school girlfriend is now a senior civil servant in Nigeria. She wants to get in touch, but her bank account has been frozen.

Dammit! It doesn’t matter if it’s expensive beer–it hurts the sinuses!

Yeah but this guy claimed the Match employee actually went out on a date with him.

Okay, as Robin says, I can see that as a serious loss leader, but you are right that it doesn’t make sense as a general business strategy. You’d have to be paying locals to fake it, which would up the cost by around an order of magnitude (unless you could pay piece rate) and make the coordination much harder, plus face to face contact adds risks.

On the other hand, one date would probably make it possible to string the sucker out for an extra month, just on the hope they’d get a second hit. Maybe if you charged $100/month for the service you could break even at $10/hour?

I think the sucker in the OP is definitely right to sue. We haven’t had any independent enforcement of false advertising laws in the US in a long time.

When I log onto Verizon’s ‘Mobile Web’ from my cell phone there’s an ad at the top telling me I have one unread text message. The icon they use in the ad is nearly identical to the icon that appears on my phone when I actually do receive a text message and, needless to say, I too have a secret admirer in Brisbane.