We probably didn’t need a formal study to tell us that.

But that’s exactly what Tobii, maker of eye-tracking technology, set out to do.

The Sweden-based company, in collaboration with AnswerLab, recently pounced on a bunch of people at a San Francisco coffee shop and asked them to participate in a study in which they’d be examining the dating profiles of members of the opposite sex — and during the session, their eye movements would be tracked by Tobii’s sensors.

After participants viewed mock-up pages of eHarmony.com and Match.com profiles, the verdict was in: Men spent 65 percent more time than women did reviewing photos in profiles; women spent 50 percent more time reading the text about a potential mate’s background and interests.

Women also spent an average of 84 seconds gazing at a profile to determine if it was a match, compared to 58 seconds for men.

The study also revealed that people tend to like dating profiles that they feel are more reflective of the kind they would build for themselves. For example, people that prefer to share lots of personal info gravitated more toward very personal dating profiles, while those that stick to “just the facts, ma’am,” liked profiles that had simpler demographic info and data.

Tobii uses tracking technology that zeroes in on a user’s pupil and calculates the point of gaze using algorithms. For heavy blinkers or those with shifty eyes, the recovery time of Tobii’s sensor is between 100 and 300 milliseconds; it draws an “imaginary box” around the user’s head to account for lots of head movement, as well.

For more info on how it works, check out this video from D9, where Tobii general manager Barbara Barclay demoed how Tobii could help users control their laptops with just their eyeballs. Late last month, the company introduced its X1 Light Eye Tracker, marketed mainly to usability and market researchers.

To demonstrate the usefulness of its eye-tracking tech at the consumer level, Tobii is planning to conduct more studies and present more interesting use cases, Barclay said. The next study, for example, might be even more precise: Instead of examining who is looking at pictures versus text, the next study might shed light on which area of the pictures people’s eyes tend to linger on. (We know what you’re thinking right now.)

Ultimately, these types of studies could be most useful for advertisers, as well as Web companies.

The study showed that when there was a great deal of ad content on the right-hand side of a profile page, participants would be distracted by the ads and avert their eyes from the profile information. Great news for advertisers, but bad news for those who want to remain focused on the task at hand.

It’s important to note that the sample for this study was very small: The company managed to convince more than 40 people to try it out, but had to throw away a handful of samples due to inconclusive data, which can be caused by certain types of glasses, lazy or droopy eyes, or an extreme amount of gaze-shifting.

But Tobii’s Barclay says continued testing could help companies determine monetization strategies and how they might conflict with the ultimate goal of a Web site’s content, or to help advertisers make ads more relevant and boost click-through rates.

(Feature photo courtesy of Flickr)

The Los Angeles-based company is aiming to become the eHarmony of e-commerce, meaning that it is trying to help e-commerce providers match the right shopping experience to the right shopper, in real time.

The reason SteelHouse is optimistic is that its president and CEO, Mark Douglas, was the VP of technology at eHarmony for almost four years.

Investors in the latest round include Greycroft Partners, Rincon Venture Partners and Lighthouse Venture Group. The company’s original investors are Baroda Ventures and Silicon Valley angel Ron Conway. The company had previously raised $1.55 million in a first round.

SteelHouse is building a behavioral platform that allows e-commerce companies to present different offers to shoppers, based on the personality and behavior of the person visiting. Some of its clients include Comedy Central, Mrs. Fields, SkyMall, eCampus.com, Evite and Cooking.com.

The company says it will use the capital to continue investing in its technology.

The company has done this by bucking the trends, both when it was founded during the dot-com bubble–when a slew of companies launched to marry the power of the Internet with the age-old desire to meet Mr. or Ms. Right–and more recently, when a new crop of sites has focused on casual dating through features such as social networking or video chat.

Now, as it expands internationally and prepares new services in its existing markets, the matchmaking site must continue to address its built-in challenge – how to keep its business expanding even when its most satisfied customers stop using the service.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Catalyst Group, a New York usability-research firm, reviewed the two popular dating sites with an eye toward how they walk customers through profiles, finding matches and making contact.

The study considered feedback from eight users of each site (four men and four women) who had been a date with someone they contacted through it in the past month.

Among the findings: eHarmony, which markets itself to people seeking serious relationships, “was preferred by people who would prefer a high degree of handholding,” but experienced users find the profiles “formulaic.” Some also bristle at how they see potential matches — as chosen by eHarmony, not by a search of their choosing.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Pretty self-explanatory, but I do want to commend the gents at IAC’s (IACI) video factory for:

1. Trying to broaden their demo to include theater people, as well as parents of theater people and parents of College Humor fans. And…
2. Using some SEO savvy. Name-checking Twitter, Facebook, Evite, eHarmony, Pandora and other Web favorites should help make up some ground this will lose on Digg. Where I assume most users will be bemused, at best.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090629/sharks-jets-page-views-web-site-story/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090419/weekend-update-41909/ http://allthingsd.com/20090419/weekend-update-41909/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 08:39:47 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=16380 A look back at the week during which approximately 40 percent of the posts were about Twitter. Or at least it seemed that way.

BoomTown got the ball rolling by making a visit to Twitter HQ bearing pies. During a video tour of the premises, Biz Stone discussed rock stars and booze, and spilled the secret of the strange green deer. Later, co-founders Stone and Evan Williams were customarily nonspecific in a conversation about their revenue plans, and BoomTown was a little bit horrified to have become one of Ashton Kutcher’s million-plus followers–maybe even the one that put him over the top in his race with CNN to hit the seven-figure mark. Still on the celebrity tip (but off the Twitter one), BoomTown took a moment to appreciate the self-deprecatory stylings of Lindsay Lohan’s eHarmony spoof and to embed the video on AllThingsD.com. Finally, was there anyone this week who missed Susan Boyle’s virtually instant stardom on “Britain’s Got Talent” via Google’s (GOOG) YouTube? BT took a look at the journey the story has taken from television to Internet, back to television and back to Internet again.

Back to Twitter, MediaMemo took a look at its amazing growth as a service and as a phenomenon–the “hockey stick,” as one early investor describes the company’s trajectory so far. MM also looked at a study from the USC neuroscience group that says despite all the hype–or maybe even because of it–the human brain just isn’t built to digest information at Twitter’s pace. In the world of cable this week, just as folks were wondering whether Congress will stop the cable companies from charging by the byte, Time Warner Cable (TWX), one of the key players in the drama, backed away from its plans to do so. MediaMemo followed that story as well.

In this week’s Personal Technology column, Walt Mossberg took a look at the latest version of Apple’s (AAPL) MobileMe, and while he found it to be a big improvement over the product launch from last summer, it’s not without limitations. In Mossberg’s Mailbox, Walt answered questions from readers about displaying emergency contact numbers on a locked cellphone and the security of running Windows software on the Mac. And in Mossberg Solution, Katie Boehret took a look at Gwabbit, a program built to mine emails for contact info.

More next week.

Look, BoomTown will admit it: I am riveted to the trials and tribulations of one former child actor moppet gone wild upon growing up.

I mean to say Lindsay Lohan, of course–or LiLo or La Loca Lohan or Lindsanity, as online gossip blogger Perez Hilton has dubbed her.

Whatever her personal turmoil, the troubled actress has been the patron saint of the Web’s gossip sites, as well as magazines and more, most recently for the spectacular and restraining-orders-all-around breakup she has had with DJ Samantha Ronson.

So where did Lohan go to get some control of the crazed situation back?

Why the Internet, of course, with a pretty funny video of a spoof of an eHarmony online dating ad that is now posted on the Web’s celebrity-comedy central, Funny or Die.

The video has had 1.6 million views there already, after just being posted yesterday. In it, Lohan references her Internet infamy.

“I’m an actress, a singer, an entrepreneur and I have single-handedly kept 90 percent of all gossip Web sites in business,” she says in the video at one point, doing a very good job, considering the topic, which only reminds us that she was once a very promising actress.

Then Lohan sums it up with a flourish:

“So, if you think you can handle a redhead with a little bit of sass, and by that I mean a redhead that’s crazy… I mean don’t pretend like you don’t know me, we’ve all read about it! We’ll crash a few parties, a car or two, but at the end of the day, I promise you, I never lose my Google hits–just my underwear.”

Google (GOOG) must be completely relieved by that news.

Here’s the video: